CODEWITHSUNDEEP
gitgithub
Ivan Xiao
Ivan Xiao

Reputation: 1969

Avoid unwanted merge commits and other commits when doing pull request on GitHub

I forked a project on Github.

Let the remote upstream be upstream and my remote repository be origin. My local master branch is set to track the remote master branch. Then I added some stuff in local master, and I merged with the upstream every now and then.

Not until today when I want to issue a pull request did I find the problem: the pull request consists those merge commits, and those unwanted commits that I did previously without care. However what I want is just to submit the last commit I did, which should be pulled as a single commit. What can I do to rescue this?

Upvotes: 26

Views: 15536

Answers (5)

Ivan Akcheurov
Ivan Akcheurov

Reputation: 2361

This looks like an answer to your question (section "Update 2011-04-15" of the topic):

Git workflow and rebase vs merge questions

Micah describes the technique of squash merges which let you merge changes from your feature branch as a single commit to the master branch.

Upvotes: 0

csd
csd

Reputation: 944

If I understand your question, you want to get rid of the intermediate/throwaway commits that you did in your branch. Try something like this:

git checkout -b for-upstream remotes/origin/master (create a new branch from the upstream origin)
git cherry-pick <sha-of-the-one-commit-you-want-to-submit> (fix any conflicts if necessary)

this should give you a local "for-upstream" branch which contains just the upstream master + your 1 commit. You can then submit that branch for pull request

Upvotes: 11

wewals
wewals

Reputation: 1447

On Github, You can't create a pull request for a single specific checkin on a branch that has multiple checkins separating it from upstream.

Create a branch specifically for each pull request you intend to make. This allows you to continue working without fear of polluting a pull request.

Upvotes: 6

Arrowmaster
Arrowmaster

Reputation: 9271

Instead of merging you want to rebase. You can do this manually, or automatically when pulling.

git pull --rebase upstream master
git push --force origin master

Once you've started doing merges though this will get hard to do, you'll need to reset the branch back to before you did a merge commit.

Upvotes: 28

Jay Sullivan
Jay Sullivan

Reputation: 18249

Would this work: Create a separate branch with just the commit you want and issue a pull request on that branch.

Upvotes: 3

Related Questions