Squashing commits in a git feature branch into a single commit in master

So you finally finished the work on that new feature in your local branch and now, starring at the output of git log would like to commit something more intelligent than those 30 commits with message “typo correction” to appear in the master branch? No problem with git.

What we are going to do will destroy commit history and will result in loss of your work if you screw up, so to be safe do the squashing in a separate branch

git checkout -b squashing_branch

To squash all commits in the feature branch into one, do

git rebase -i master

Your text editor will open with a file like this:

pick 3394ba1 commit msg 1
pick a4e4de9 commit msg 2
pick 2c57042 commit msg 3
pick 24386f9 commit msg 4
pick b86e92c commit msg 5
pick 08728d8 commit msg 6

Change it to look like

pick 3394ba1 commit msg 1
squash a4e4de9 commit msg 2
squash 2c57042 commit msg 3
squash 24386f9 commit msg 4
squash b86e92c commit msg 5
squash 08728d8 commit msg 6

to take the first commit and squash all the others into it. If you delete a line, that commit will be really lost once and for all, so be warned (but not worried, if you created the squashing branch before, you will have another try). And don’t bother editing the commit messages – you will do it a second later when your editor opens again with a file combined from all the messages of the squashed commits. Now just switch to master and merge your squashed branch

git checkout master
git merge squashing_branch