Rebasing on master without merging every conflict of each commit of feature branch

Question

I want to rebase my branch onto main. My feature branch is 40 commits ahead of the master branch.

When I do a git rebase main

I need to solve the merge conflict for the first commit, when that is done I :

git add MODIFIED_FILES
git rebase --continue

and I end up solving the conflicts of my 2nd commit. I simply cannot resolved 40 merge conflicts even that all of those first commits are rather obsolete compared to the latest development of my branch.

Is there a way to git rebase by doing solving the conflicts on only my latest branch's commit.

Answer 1

Finally found a solution to my problem :

1/ Squash my X number of commits (commit id <specific_commit>) in my feature branch first :

git rebase -i <specific_commit>
git push -f

By doing this your 40 commits become 1 in your feature branch history

2/ I rebase onto main by solving 1/2 conflicts only

# make sure that main is up to date
git rebase main
# solve conflicts
git rebase --continue
# might need to solve conflicts twice
git push -f

By doing this I get the linear history of the main branch into my feature branch which would make PR ready to be merged afterwards by the repo's maintainer.

Answer 2

You are looking for the often overlooked git rerere command ("reuse recorded resolution"). It applies a previous conflict resolution to an identical later conflict. This is what usually happens during rebasing.

Note that you can also automate running this command using a configuration variable:

git config --global rerere.enabled true