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 periodicall

Answer 1

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 !)

Answer 2

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>