Git merge-base determines the most recent common ancestor of two branches
This article explains how we can find the most recent common ancestor commit in Git. This comes in handy when you create a branch or merge one branch into another.
Without further ado, let’s get into today’s topic.
Determine the most recent common ancestor of two branches in Git
What is the common ancestor of two branches in Git?
Take a look at the pictures below.
In the above image, we have the master branch, in which we created a feature branch and a new-feature branch. Let's get rid of the master branch and focus on feature and new-feature branches.
We can see that we created the new feature branch after the bd9172c commit. As you might have guessed, bd9172c commit is the most recent common ancestor of our feature and main branches.
So, how do we find the most recent common ancestor of these two branches?
You only need git merge-basethe command. From Git's documentation, git merge-basethe command helps us findgit merge the best common ancestor of .
However, we can enter two branches as arguments to display the most recent common ancestor of the provided branches.
grammar:
$ git merge-base <Branch 1> <Branch 2>
Let’s look at an example.
The example below shows the master and feature branches of our local repository. To find the common ancestor between the two, we will run git merge-basethe command as shown below.
$ git merge-base master feature
This command should show the commit hash of the common ancestor.
Output:
We can use the following command to get the visualization log.
$ git log --graph --oneline --all --decorate
You should get output like this:
We can see that our feature branch forked from master at commit 2dbe38d , which is consistent with what we did earlier when we rangit merge-base , which is the same commit hash we got when we ran the command earlier.
git merge-baseYou can find the nearest common ancestor commit of two branches in Git
using the command when entering the branch at hand .
Note that this command only gets the most recent common ancestor.
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