Reshaping history — rebase, stash, tag, cherry-pick
Techniques for editing history you already made. Powerful, and bound by one golden rule you must not break.
What you'll learn
- You can tidy your own with an
- You can shelve work in progress and come back to it
- You can mark a release point with a and lift a single with
From here on you're editing history you already made. git rebase lifts your commits and replants them on top of another commit, straightening the history into one line. Where merge records what actually happened, rebase arranges it to be read. Add -i and you can squash commits together, reword messages, or reorder them before they go public.
There is exactly one golden rule: never rebase commits you have already shared. Rebase makes new commits and swaps them in. So if someone was building on the old ones, the history splits and is painful to put back together. Use it freely on your own until you open the , and not after.
git stash puts your unfinished work on a shelf — the command you reach for when an urgent lands and you must switch branches right now. git tag pins a name like v1.0.0 to a commit so you can find the exact you released. git cherry-pick lifts a single commit from another branch into this one. All three are tools for handling a part rather than the whole.
Understand it easily
stash is a drawer where you quickly put half-done work. rebase re-stacks your commits on top of the newest , as if you had started later. tag is a bookmark for a release, and cherry-pick copies just one commit to another branch.
Commands for this step
Don't just read them — type them into a real . Your hands have to remember, not your eyes.
git rebase -i HEAD~3- Interactively tidy your last three commits — squash, reword, reorder.
git stash push -m "작업 중"- Shelve your current changes with a note so you can switch branches now.
git tag -a v1.0.0 -m "첫 배포"- Mark this commit as a release point with an annotated tag.
git cherry-pick <commit>- Bring just one commit from another branch into this one.
Common mistake and how to fix it
Rebasing commits that are already and shared, then . Your teammates' history breaks. The golden rule: rebase only your own commits that nobody else has . To undo something already shared, use revert.
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