Skip to main content

Git magic - Pushing commits past your latest commit

Published on

It was my first full fledged feature and I was excited to know review comments from my manager. As much as the excitement, the learning that came with taking action on each comment was tremendous and I still can't describe how good I feel about it.

It's one of the times when I thought Git to be, "Wow! what an invention!!"

Although I had some code refactors, most of the comments were to split my single commit into several different commits for the sake of CI picking them up.

I thought, it's simple. I can amend my previous commit to remove files from existing commit and make them part of new commits. That's where trouble came up. I cannot remove a dependency and try to use it assuming I will have that as part of an upcoming commit. 

I definitely will have to go back in time to push a commit. At first I thought, I'll change my latest commit to be a dependency commit and create new commit for feature. However that involved a lot of manual work which would defeat the purpose of git itself in the first place. I had to come up with some different trick and as usual I went in search. My search phrases went as, 

  1. create commits in between
  2. push a commit before latest commit
  3. alter commit history to add commit
and so on. I gathered information from a number of stack overflow answers and finally came up with the following method. 

/**
 * @disclaimer
 * Please read this post fully before executing any command. My scenario might not be same as yours.
*/

So the steps involved are as follows,

  1. Execute git log
  2. Copy the commit hash after which you have to push a new commit
  3. Do a git checkout <copied_commit_hash>. For instance, git checkout 54ace3456ka235rtyc90
  4. After that, your head is pointing to the mentioned commit hash. 
  5. Now, make any change and do the required commit(s)
  6. Once you are done with all your commits, you will have to rebase with the below mentioned command,
    git rebase --onto HEAD <copied_commit_hash> <your_working_branch>

    For instance,
    git rebase --onto HEAD 54ace3456ka235rtyc90 working/my-new-feat
  7. Now, all the commits you made after the checkout will be showing past your top most commit. You could verify that by executing git log.
Tada! Although git would show exact time when each commit was made, (i.e) although chronologically your most recent commit is actually older, the commit history would show it exactly where you wanted it to show. I will further dig & write about pushing commits in between few of the commits sooner. I hope this helps you get through. 

Labels:

Comments

  1. Unknown3 February 2022 at 08:58

    Git is like Time travel, whatever you want you can achieve. Thanks for sharing this blog..

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

WebRTC - What the heck?

Published on
Over the past few weeks, I happened to work on stuff that enabled me to understand what WebRTC is and how useful it is.  The full form? Web R eal- T ime C ommunication The history It's first release was by 2011. If you want to know more, well, please read the wikipedia . WebRTC  has been a boon to web developers who want to build streaming applications or video calling applications. As you move downward, you'll just may be understand how WebRTC works but nothing technicals.  The story Let's begin with a short story. Long long ago, so long ago, nobody knew how long ago, there lived two shop keeper farmers John & Finch. It was that old point in time when barter system was a thing and money wasn't invented.  These shopkeepers lived in different cities across a river and the cities were connected by a rock solid bridge. Like how the golden gate connects the San Francisco city and the Marin County. Finch is a very private person and takes hard time to trust people. John
2 comments
Read more

Git - How to drop a commit in history?

Published on
Back after a while with another git magic. We already have seen how to get rid of the top most commit in this article ->  Git magic - Make commits disappear First of all, it's one of the not so recommended way of doing it and more than that, it can only get rid of sequential commits from latest. I recently happened to get into a scenario where I had to drop a commit in the history by keeping the latest ones. As part of that exploration, presenting you this article. /**  *  @disclaimer  * Please read this post fully before executing any command. My scenario might not be same as yours. */ To my greatest surprise, I didn't know a git rebase could do this. Please continue to read to know how. The steps are simple, Count until the commit line you need to drop using git log Do an interactive rebase and you're done.  Let me explain step by step. 1. Look at the commit log & count commits This is the first step. First let's list the commits using the following command,  
Post a Comment
Read more

Git - Removing a file from a commit

Published on
Once again, another git magic that might be of help to some of you. This research came up when I accidentally added a couple of unwanted files and wanted to remove them from a commit. We all know that to update an existing commit, we shall follow this git magic to amend commits . However, how do we drop changes to a particular file in a commit? While that is easy, it is also tricky. This blog post covers scenarios and respective commands that help you understand what should be done. /**  *  @disclaimer  * Please read this post fully before executing any command. My scenario might not be the same as yours. */ There are two scenarios to be handled here, Remove a newly added file Remove changes to an existing file Let's look at them separately, Remove a newly added file This is the scenario where an unwanted file added to the commit. This file might be some config.json that got generated while doing a research on a new testing tool or a bundling tool. Such scenarios are easier. 1. Re
Post a Comment
Read more