Git: “Cannot 'squash' without a previous commit” error while rebase

Question

I have the following in the to-do text of git rebase -i HEAD~2:

pick 56bcce7 Closes #2774
pick e43ceba Lint.py: Replace deprecated link

# Rebase 68         


        

Answer 1

I had this problem and the reason why it happened in my case was that, you cannot squash older commits onto a new commit. Here is an example say you have 3 commits:

1 pick 01mn9h78 The lastest commit
2 pick a2b6pcfr A commit before the latest
3 pick 093479uf An old commit i made a while back

Now if you say git rebase -i HEAD~3 and you do something like

1 pick 01mn9h78 The lastest commit
2 s a2b6pcfr A commit before the latest
3 s 093479uf An old commit i made a while back

This will result in the error:

error: cannot 'squash' without a previous commit You can fix this with 'git rebase --edit-todo' and then run 'git rebase --continue'. Or you can abort the rebase with 'git rebase --abort'.

Solution :

When squashing commits, you should squash recent commits to old ones not vice versa thus in the example it will be something like this:

1 s 01mn9h78 The lastest commit
2 s a2b6pcfr A commit before the latest
3 pick 093479uf An old commit i made a while back

This will work fine, incase you want all your commit messages, I would suggest fixup instead of squash.