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Why you should not fear rebase…

Last week our junior developers shared their experiences and lessons learned during a ‘dev case’. One thing they al mentioned is that doing a ‘rebase’ in GIT is, according to their opinion, a bad idea. Although rebasing is a powerful tool, and you have to apply it carefully, there is no reason to avoid it all cost.

Some things to keep in mind before you rebase:

  1. Never rebase commits that have been pushed to a remote origin and shared with others.
  2. Use rebase to catch up with the commits on another branch as you work with a local feature branch.
  3. You can't update a published branch with a push after you've rebased the local branch. You'll need to force push the branch to rewrite the history of the remote branch to match the local history. Never force push branches in use by others.

As a general rule it would only use rebase on local changes that haven't been shared with others. Once you’ve shared your changes, switch to merge instead.

  • To use rebase, go to Team Explorer –> Branches.
  • Select Rebase instead of Merge.
  • Specify the target branch and click Rebase.

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