How to avoid merge-commit hell on GitHub/BitBucket
bitbucket, git, github
Solution
Rebase Feature Branches Before Merging
If you want to avoid merge commits, you need to ensure all commits are fast-forwards. You do this by making sure your feature branch rebases cleanly onto your line of development before a merge like so:
git checkout master
git checkout -b feature/foo
# make some commits
git rebase master
git checkout master
git merge --ff-only feature/foo
Rebase also has a lot of flags, including interactive rebasing with the `-i` flag, but you may not need that if you're keeping things as simple as possible and want to preserve all of your branch history on a merge.
Use the `--ff-only` Flag
Aside from rebasing, the use of the `--ff-only` flag will ensure that only fast-forward commits are allowed. A commit will not be made if it would be a merge commit instead. The git-merge(1) manual page says:
--ff-only
Refuse to merge and exit with a non-zero status unless the current HEAD is already up-to-date or the merge can be resolved as a fast-forward.
Problem
We're ending up with a lot of commits like this in our repo: ``` Merge branch 'master' of bitbucket.org:user/repo ``` This happens every time a developer syncs his/hers local fork to the top-level repo. Is there anyway to avoid this merge-commit hell from cluttering all the repo log? Can one avoid them when initiating the pull-requests in some way? I know I can do git rebase if this is done in my local VM only, is there any equivalence in the GitHub/BitBucket UI? How do you guys do it?