Core development / Related HOWTOs / Useful git commands - Advanced

Note: You are currently reading the documentation for Bolt 3.7. Looking for the documentation for Bolt 5.2 instead?

This HOWTO is aimed at people doing development, or debugging, of Bolt.

They are not recommended as installation guides especially for production environments.

WARNING: Always make backups!

Tip: This guide is an advance guide, best suited to people comfortable with `git` basics.

Assumptions¶

This HOWTO makes the following assumptions throughout

• Bolt's main repository remote is called "upstream"
• Your personal fork of the bolt/bolt repository remote is called "origin"
• X.Y notation is used to refer the semantic versioning of "minor" and "patch" release numbers.

Rebasing¶

REALLY BIG WARNING: Rebasing as detailed here, is only to be done to affect non-release or master branches, more specifically those under sole personal use for preparation of pull requests.

Tip: If during a rebase, things go horribly wrong and you want to just abort the process, well git provides `git rebase --abort` to get you back to where you started.

Rebasing against desired merge branch¶

NOTE This assumes that the branch you are wanting to have merged, is having its starting point moved from the HEAD when branched, to the HEAD commit of upstream.

git checkout hotfix/issue-1555
git fetch upstream/X.Y
git rebase upstream/X.Y

This will checkout your local working branch, fetch the changes from Bolt's main repository, without merging them, and then attempts to rebase.

Combining several commits into one¶

If you have several commits that are better served to your fellow programmers as a single change, making it more relevant for reviewers.

To commence a rebase in this way, you provide the -i option:

git rebase -i upstream/X.Y

This will start your configured console editor, with a list of commits similar to:

pick 276cbfc Move x, y, z
pick b82ea54 Actually move y
pick 9fefe1e Actually, actually move z
pick 766b73e Fix something

Assuming the second and third commits should be combined with the first, you simply change the verb from pick to fixup or even just f.

pick 276cbfc Move x, y, z
fixup b82ea54 Actually move y
fixup 9fefe1e Actually, actually move z
pick 766b73e Fix something

Once saved, and you've exited the editor, git will attempt to combine the three commits, leaving the last one alone.

876cb10 Move x, y, z
a16b910 Fix something

Moving a branch from one starting point to another¶

If your branch was started from one branch, and you wish to reattach the starting point of your branch, of another:

git rebase --onto <new branch> <old branch>

This is very useful if a branch is required to be merged into a different branch than it was started from.