How do I use Git's interactive rebase with a local-only repository (no remote / origin)?

Question

I use git as a local source control system mostly for history and diff tracking. I still want to use rebase to do fixup / squash on WIP commits that I will make periodically. When I try to do git rebase -i though, I get the following:

There is no tracking information for the current branch.
Please specify which branch you want to rebase against.
See git-rebase(1) for details

    git rebase <branch>

If you wish to set tracking information for this branch you can do so with:

    git branch --set-upstream-to=<remote>/<branch> MyBranch

It seems like git doesn't expect you to use interactive rebase without an upstream remote? How do I do that?

Sculpsit

simply use $ git rebase -i HEAD~4 ref What does it mean to squash commits in git?. Here "HEAD~4" means to specify the commits as using the last four commits from where the HEAD is. – Tocharian

Answer 1

git rebase -i in shorthand, without specifying a destination branch, will make git assume that you are trying to rebase against a remote branch tracked by your branch. That's why the error message is mentioning stuff about remotes.

When you do specify a target, git will rebase against that commit-ish:

git rebase -i <commit-ish>

Strati

You can track any branch, local or remote. – Hashish

Yeah - tried to edit the answer to point that out, because I basically re-edited my original self answer to be the same. HEAD~3 here is not an essential part of the syntax, it's just one (of any) possible commit refs. – Sculpsit

HEAD~3 is only there because your original answer attemps to rebase on HEAD~3, and going through unnecessary steps to acheive it. I can put commit-ish if you prefer... – Acidulous

This answer should explain what "commit-ish" means or at least link to it like mcw0933's comment on the other answer – Staffer

Answer 2

So in short - if you have 3 local commits and you now want to interactively rebase/squash/etc them:

git rebase -i HEAD~3

(See Sébastien's explanation !)

Closed

Yup - thanks @MikeW. That is one concrete example of what you can use for the "commit-ish" parameter to git. For anyone unfamiliar with what a "commit-ish" is... check out this other SO answer: #23304049 – Sculpsit