Git: Combine all messy commits into one commit before merging to Master branch

Assume we have a new branch name capistrano-configuration which is branched out from Master. Inside capistrano-configuration branch, there are a lot of messy commits as we change a piece of code many times and deploy to the staging server with cap staging deploy command.

Once we type git log, the commit logs will be:

commit 8eb3a6e68a2453e602c346d43f0c1229dc159221
Author: Someth Victory <[email protected]>
Date:   Tue Aug 25 14:09:31 2015 +0700

    Remove unused code

commit 59e4f4290e0940da42a66673cfc026e5c8e735c9
Author: Someth Victory <[email protected]>
Date:   Tue Aug 25 10:57:25 2015 +0700

    Change some config and update style

commit 2bf99e1d42e769e9e4029da1139cde1d83523b3e
Author: Someth Victory <[email protected]>
Date:   Tue Aug 25 09:48:33 2015 +0700

    Update stylesheet

commit 8781bc74904c7b986d6ead74272fce48837b06a3
Author: Someth Victory <[email protected]>
Date:   Tue Aug 25 09:30:04 2015 +0700

    Update font color to black

commit 423dc810588270ac23878493b143c55c8856b8dc
Author: Someth Victory <[email protected]>
Date:   Tue Aug 25 09:24:15 2015 +0700

    Update import stylesheet

commit d366250fe6db29bd744e006629806b770da68173
Author: Someth Victory <[email protected]>
Date:   Mon Aug 24 17:32:33 2015 +0700

    Update style

As you see that the commit logs are very messy and meaningless. We still actually could merge capistrano-configuration into master, but it's not a good practice as it will pollute the commit message in master.

The ideal solution is to combine all the commits into only one meaningful commit message.

Step 1: Create another branch from the latest master

Assume that you are on your latest master branch.

git checkout -b capistrano-config

Step 2: Merge capistrano-configuration into capistrano-config with --squash option

git checkout capistrano-config
git merge --squash capistrano-configuration
git commit # without -m 

An editor should be popup with all the commit logs, and files changed from capistrano-configuration. You could actually delete everything, and write only one line of the commit message you want to show after merging into master. In this case, we write "Setup Capistrano Configuration". Save and quite the editor.

Step 3: Merge your newly created branch into master

Last but not least, you could actually merge capistrano-config into master now.

git checkout master
git merge capistrano-config

You are done!

When you type git log in your master branch, it will show the following logs:

commit 2a5853e36e0ddc20ad52aef44ec1da8666ae6cf8
Author: Someth Victory <[email protected]>
Date:   Tue Aug 25 14:43:42 2015 +0700

    Setup staging configuration

commit f835f98ed5e49b1ad262236f319c9bc1881ffa68
Author: Uysim <[email protected]>
Date:   Fri Aug 14 11:32:59 2015 +0700

    Fix some style

commit 5c275c060c1f7288f281d5343114729b50432812
Author: Someth Victory <[email protected]>
Date:   Fri Aug 14 09:20:26 2015 +0700

    Update README.md

Now you get only one meaningful commit message in the master branch.