Git Merge vs Git Rebase

Needone App
2 min readJan 12, 2021

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TLDR

Both git rebase and git merge are used to synchronise changes between branches. The difference is git rebase will revise the commits but keep a clean organised history, while git merge will keep all the original commits and add ones automatically but gives out a circuit board like history.

Real world scenarios

Image you have two branches: feature and master. feature is from master, after some time, for some reason, master has some changes which feature doesn't have

Git merge

What git merge do:

  • Wouldn’t change the commit timestamp
  • Wouldn’t change the commit hash
  • Will create a new commit automatically
  • When there are many people are using the git merge in a project, it will cause commits across each other in history, in the end it will show the commits like a Circuit board.

How to do git merge:

  • Step 1: git checkout feature
  • Step 2: git merge master , might need to resolve some conflicts while doing this step

Git Rebase

What git rebase do:

  • Change the commit timestamp
  • Change the commit hash
  • Not introduce any new commit automatically
  • Generate nice and organised git history, like the one in the following:

git rebase will move the current changes to upmost, and keep the current change history.

How to do git rebase:

  • Step 1: git checkout feature
  • Step 2: git rebase master , might need to resolve some conflicts while doing this step. Here we might rebase the code multiple times. So it is a good idea to squash all the commits into one.

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Reference

https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/merging-vs-rebasing

Originally published at https://needone.app on January 12, 2021.

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