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Furkan Gulsen
Furkan Gulsen

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Git Rebase vs Git Merge

Git Rebase and Git Merge are commands generally used to merge two branches. The difference here is the way they do this combination.

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When we typed “git Rebase”, all the changes of the feature branch will be added to the master branch one by one. Here, if we search for a historical history, we will see only one history. Because when we typed “git rebase”, a single history will be created because all branches are collected on a single path.

Advantages of Git Rebase

  • Converts complex history into a single format
  • Simplifies DevOps work by reducing multiple comments to a single comment.

Advantages of Git Merge

  • Simple and clear
  • Preserves the history in chronological order
  • Protects branches

Which Should We Use?

If you are working with a single or small team, it will be more advantageous to use git rebase. But if you’re working with a big team, use git merge.

Top comments (6)

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vulcanwm profile image
Medea

this really helped, thanks!
so if im working on my own i should use git rebase?

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ant_f_dev profile image
Anthony Fung

Yes. That said, I haven't found many cases where I've had to merge or rebase when working on a solo project: I'm typically working on the latest code, and no one else is adding to the branch.

Generally, I'll work on a feature branch that's based off main. When it's ready, I'll just fast-forward merge main into my feature branch, which moves main without creating a merge commit.

While it's not the biggest of repositories, here's an example of a (mostly) solo project of mine

github.com/Ant-f/WorkingFilesList

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vulcanwm profile image
Medea

Ah okay thanks

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ieiradouglas profile image
Douglas Vieira da Silva

Yes!

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ant_f_dev profile image
Anthony Fung

I'd say in general, rebase where possible as a first preference. There is one very important advantage of rebasing: it keeps the feature branch clean, meaning that it can be (relatively) easy to port to other branches, e.g. for alternative test deployments.

If you rebase and then deliberately create a merge commit into the main branch, you get the best of both worlds. It keeps all working commits together, and makes it easy to revert if necessary to roll back

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webduvet

I would say it depends not really on the size of a team and project but on what you do.
e.g. multiple devs working on smaller individual features - candidate for merge
e.g. (multiple) devs working and bigger feature or refactor along the regular development, touching a lot of code - candidate for rebase.