When do you use Git rebase instead of Git merge?

Question

When is it recommended to use Git rebase vs. Git merge?

Do I still need to merge after a successful rebase?

Answer 1

It's simple. With rebase you say to use another branch as the new base for your work.

If you have, for example, a branch master, you create a branch to implement a new feature, and say you name it cool-feature, of course the master branch is the base for your new feature.

Now at a certain point you want to add the new feature you implemented in the master branch. You could just switch to master and merge the cool-feature branch:

$ git checkout master
$ git merge cool-feature

But this way a new dummy commit is added. If you want to avoid spaghetti-history you can rebase:

$ git checkout cool-feature
$ git rebase master

And then merge it in master:

$ git checkout master
$ git merge cool-feature

This time, since the topic branch has the same commits of master plus the commits with the new feature, the merge will be just a fast-forward.