How to git rebase -i for a range of commits?

Question

Can I squash a range of commits for a local feature/topic branch using rebase that does not include the most recent commit? This is for commits that I want to prepare before they get merged and pushed to a public repo.

I was working quickly and made a bunch of minor changes with poor titles and descriptions that I want to squash into two or three separate logical commits with a great comments. Can I select a range of commits between 329aed9 and af39283 that could be at any point in this feature branch's short history?

git rebase -i RANGE_START_COMMIT_ID RANGE_LAST_COMMIT_ID

Thanks!

Answer 1

You could always create a new branch with git checkout -b new_branch af39283, and then rebase that. However, if you want to include the later commits at some future point, there's no getting around rebasing them as well. The SHA1 for a commit depends on all its ancestor commits.

Answer 2

So, it's not entirely clear what you mean by "not including" the most recent commit, but when you do a rebase -i you're able to squash/re-order/reword/fixup/remove prior commits without having to do anything to the last commit. You're rewriting the history underneath it of course, so its diff will be re-applied and it will be a different commit object following the rebase, but since you haven't pushed this publicly (and you're rewriting the rest of it) that shouldn't matter much.