Squashing about 6k commits into one

Question

I have a website, when I started to develop it, I've cloned Laravel github repo with all it commits. Now I want to remove all original commits, leave only mine. Is there any way to do this? I tried git rebase, but it requires to choose all 6k commits manually and removes commits from the latest. (I need from the oldest).

Answer 1

I think you can do this by checking out a specific commit, creating an orphan branch at that commit, then rebasing onto the branch.

1. Checkout the commit before your first commit
   git checkout <commit hash before your first commit>
2. Create an orphan branch. The index will contain the files at that state, but there will be no commit history.
   git checkout --orphan foo
3. Commit the squashed changes
   git commit -m 'Squashed!'
4. Checkout your main branch
   git checkout <original branch name>
5. Rebase to the new squashed branch.
   git rebase foo

I tested this with a repository with 5 commits on master:

* 40f82e6 - 5
* 78deb2c - 4
* aff34f8 - 3
* 15cd469 - 2
* 6e420cb - 1

Let's squash the first three (output is abbreviated):

$ git checkout aff34f8
Note: checking out 'aff34f8'.
HEAD is now at aff34f8 3

$ git checkout --orphan foo
Switched to a new branch 'foo'

$ git commit -m 'Squashed!'
[foo (root-commit) 933b62d] Squashed!

$ git checkout master
Switched to branch 'master'

$ git rebase foo
First, rewinding head to replay your work on top of it...
Applying: 1
Using index info to reconstruct a base tree...
Falling back to patching base and 3-way merge...
No changes -- Patch already applied.
Applying: 2
Using index info to reconstruct a base tree...
Falling back to patching base and 3-way merge...
No changes -- Patch already applied.
Applying: 3
Using index info to reconstruct a base tree...
Falling back to patching base and 3-way merge...
No changes -- Patch already applied.
Applying: 4
Applying: 5

After this change, master now looks like this:

* 5d908c9 - 5
* 477ee53 - 4
* 933b62d - Squashed!

Answer 2

You could just create a new orphaned branch if you're willing to lose your commits.

In this example the branch will be called "fresh":

git checkout --orphan fresh

Read more about git checkout --orphan in this question.

Answer 3

You could use git rebase, but with 6k or so commits to squash, that could be quite cumbersome.

Another option could be to do the following:

1. From your final commit, create a new branch: git checkout -b my-branch

2. "Reset" your staged files to be the difference between the very first commit and your current state: git reset --soft [hash of initial commit]

3. Now, your staged files are all the differences between the initial commit and the last commit. Do a git commit to commit these changes.

Now, on this newly created branch, you have a single commit after initial, which contains all the changes over those original 6k commits.