This is a trick that Ramon Snir taught me to transform a git-tracked feature branch with hundreds of commits (which I've already pushed to a GitHub-hosted remote) into looking like it never had anything but a single commit with a message of "Meaningful fake first commit message."
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git checkout the-feature-branch && git reset --hard origin/the-feature-branch- This resets your local branch to what's currently on GitHub
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git merge origin/main && git reset --soft origin/main- This makes your Git staging area include your branch's content, but your Git base commit be
main - Note that this does not pull in actual changes from the remote
mainthat have happened since you started working on the feature branch.
- This makes your Git staging area include your branch's content, but your Git base commit be
git commit -m "Meaningful fake first commit message"-
git log ^origin/main HEADto verify -
git show HEADto see that you're pleased with the result -
git push --forceonly if you're happy with everything from the previous steps- This should be the last operation because it's more-or-less irreversible
If you're on Windows, your ordinary command line interface (CLI) won't recognize the &&s in these commands, so instead use the Git Bash CLI tool that came with this version of Git you likely installed, because it uses a mini-Unix-like CLI called MinGW.
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