This command will return a long string known as a commit hash, something that looks like the following: If, however, you don’t know how many commits you have made on your branch, you’ll need to find which commit is the base of your branch, which you can do by running the following command: The x will be the number of commits you have made to your branch since you initially fetched it.
Here, -i refers to the rebase being interactive, and HEAD refers to the latest commit from the main branch. Now if you know the number of commits you’ve made on the branch that you want to rebase, you can run the git rebase command like so: If you’re working on multiple branches you can add -branches to the end of your command to limit by branch.
For projects that have an extensive history of commits by multiple authors, you’ll want to specify yourself as author in the command:īy specifying this parameter, you should be able to count up the commits you’ve made. The log shows all the commits made to the given project’s repository, so your commits will be listed along with commits made by others. This will provide you with output that looks similar to this: To find out the number of commits we have made, we can inspect the total number of commits that have been made to the project with the following command: To do this, we will need to be able to reference the commits that we have made either by number or by a string that references the base of our branch. An interactive rebase can be used to edit previous commit messages, combine several commits into one, or delete or revert commits that are not necessary any longer. To begin this process, you’ll perform an interactive rebase. If you did not do many small commits, this may not be necessary. Once you have the upstream version of the project fetched, you can clean up your comments by either squashing or rewording your commit messages to make them more digestible to the project maintainers. Then, run git fetch for the most recent upstream version of the code: Next, you want to ensure you’re in the correct branch by navigating to it with the git checkout command:
We’ll also go over using the git reflog command below in case you make an error.Īs we did in the pull request tutorial, we’ll move into the code directory: Rebasing should be done with care, and you should make sure you are working with the right commits and on the right branch throughout the process. This way, we can rebase our code to make them based on the main branch’s more recent commits. When this happens and you still want to merge your pull request, you will have to resolve conflicts and rebase your code.Ī rebase allows us to move branches around by changing the commit that they are based on. This may happen if the maintainers do not respond to your pull request for a while, or if many people are contributing to the project at once. Or like this on your pull request via GitHub’s website: OutputCONFLICT (content): Merge conflict in your-file.pyĪutomatic merge failed fix conflicts and then commit the result. You may get an error like this in your shell: While you contribute to open source, you may find that there are conflicts between your branch or pull request and the upstream code.
To learn about making pull requests, you can read “ How To Create a Pull Request on GitHub.” To learn more about contributing to open-source projects, you can read this introduction. For this reason, you will need to create a personal access token or add your SSH public key information in order to access GitHub repositories through the command line. This tutorial will walk you through the steps you’ll take after making a pull request, so you should already have Git installed, and either have made or are thinking about creating a pull request.Īs of November 2020, GitHub removed password-based authentication.
This tutorial will guide you through some of the next steps you may need to take after you submit a pull request to an open-source software project. Once you submit a pull request, the process of contributing to a project can require some rebasing and reworking of code prior to acceptance, followed by a general cleanup of your branches. Contributing to open-source projects is a rewarding experience as you work to make software better for end users like yourself.