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This article discusses the process of rebasing to a specific commit in Git. We will use a few scenarios to illustrate how this can be achieved.

We'll use git rebase --ontothe rebase command to rebase a branch to a specific commit. Let's jump right in.

Rebase to a specific commit in Git

When we need to rebase one branch onto another and specify a commit, we use the --onto flag.

Basic syntax:

$ git rebase –onto <new-parent> <old-parent> <head-of-new-parent>

Let's look at an example scenario.

This is the basic workflow we will use:

Rebase the new feature to a specific commit in main

In our first scenario, let's assume that we want to use a single commit in main, rather than rebase the entire branch. This will require us to pay attention to the SHA-1 of the commit that is in play.

We can use git log <branch-name>to get the hash of the commit.

In our case, we want to move the commits in our new feature branch to the master branch at commit 846e2fa (the second to last). We would run the following:

$ git rebase –onto 846e2fa bd9172c

The above command will produce the following result:

Since we want to move the entire new feature, we don’t need the third argument in our command. If you omit the third argument, Git defaults to moving the entire branch.

Rebase new-feature to a specific commit in main and remove the first commit in new-feature

Let's say our e2ff2bc is a dependency and we want to move our branch to main at commit 846e2fa, which is the same dependency we have. In plain English, we want to rebase new-feature onto main at 846e2fa and omit the first commit in new-feature.

Here’s how we do it:

$ git rebase –onto 846e2fa e2ff2bc

The above command will produce the following result:

The git rebase -onto command takes the parent commit as a reference. In simple terms, we should reference the commit before the commit we want to save.

Rebase new-feature to a specific commit in main and remove the last commit in new-feature

Suppose we want to move new-feature to 846e2fa but omit commit d7dbeb from new-feature. How would we go about this?

This is where the third parameter comes in. We will run the following command:

$ git rebase –onto 846e2fa bd9172c 730f163

This will result in:

The third argument simply points to the HEAD of the new parent commit; in our case, we have 730f163. This should remove that commit and all the commits after it.

In short, Git allows us to rebase a branch to a specific commit. git rebase -ontoThe command accepts three parameters when rebasing.

Always remember that the third parameter determines the new parent commit.