Advanced Git

Reach for the power tools when you need them: interactive rebase, cherry-pick, reflog for recovery, and bisect for hunting a regression.

rebase -icherry-pickreflogbisect

Duration

⏱ About 2 hours

Level

📊 Intermediate+

Prerequisite

🎯 git-coop-02

OUTCOME

Recover from any git mistake; find regressions quickly

What you'll learn

1Squash commits with interactive rebase
2Cherry-pick a commit onto another branch
3Recover deleted commits with reflog
4Find which commit introduced a bug with bisect

1. Interactive Rebase

bash

git rebase -i HEAD~5    # the last 5 commits

# pick   abc1234 Implement feature
# squash def5678 Fix typo
# squash 901234a Fix another typo
# reword 5678abc Final touches
# drop   123abc5 Unrelated commit

Use pick, squash, reword, fixup, drop, edit to reshape history before opening a PR. Only on your own branches!

2. cherry-pick

bash

git cherry-pick <hash>             # apply a single commit
git cherry-pick <hash1>..<hash3>   # range
git cherry-pick -x <hash>          # add original SHA in message

Great for hotfixes: cherry-pick a bug fix from main onto a release branch.

3. reflog — Time Machine

bash

git reflog                     # see every HEAD movement
git reset --hard HEAD@{4}      # jump back to an earlier state

💡

If you deleted a branch or reset --hard'd by mistake, the commits live in the reflog for ~30 days. Don't panic.

4. bisect — Find the Bad Commit

bash

git bisect start
git bisect bad                 # current commit is bad
git bisect good v1.0.0         # this older one was good
# git checks out the midpoint — test the code
git bisect good                # if it works
# OR
git bisect bad                 # if it fails
# repeat until git points at the offender
git bisect reset

Example code / lecture materials

All lecture materials and example code are openly available on GitHub.

View on GitHub ↗