Git Advanced Workflows

Master advanced Git techniques to maintain clean history, collaborate effectively, and recover from any situation with confidence.

Do not use this skill when

• The task is unrelated to git advanced workflows
• You need a different domain or tool outside this scope

Instructions

• Clarify goals, constraints, and required inputs.
• Apply relevant best practices and validate outcomes.
• Provide actionable steps and verification.

When to Use

• Cleaning up commit history before merging
• Applying specific commits across branches
• Finding commits that introduced bugs
• Working on multiple features simultaneously
• Recovering from Git mistakes or lost commits
• Managing complex branch workflows
• Preparing clean PRs for review
• Synchronizing diverged branches

Repository and Recovery Boundary

Read repository instructions and branch protection first. A hotfix follows the protected PR/maintainer path when required; urgency does not authorize a direct default-branch commit or push. Preserve dirty and staged work before checkout, rebase, reset or restore. A backup branch protects committed history only, not uncommitted files. Inspect exact targets before destructive operations and obtain authorization for shared-history rewrites. Reflog availability depends on local expiry and garbage collection; it cannot guarantee recovery of every lost file.

Core Concepts

1. Interactive Rebase

Interactive rebase is the Swiss Army knife of Git history editing.

Common Operations:

• pick: Keep commit as-is
• reword: Change commit message
• edit: Amend commit content
• squash: Combine with previous commit
• fixup: Like squash but discard message
• drop: Remove commit entirely

Basic Usage:

# Rebase last 5 commits
git rebase -i HEAD~5

# Rebase all commits on current branch
git rebase -i $(git merge-base HEAD main)

# Rebase onto specific commit
git rebase -i abc123

2. Cherry-Picking

Apply specific commits from one branch to another without merging entire branches.

# Cherry-pick single commit
git cherry-pick abc123

# Cherry-pick range of commits (exclusive start)
git cherry-pick abc123..def456

# Cherry-pick without committing (stage changes only)
git cherry-pick -n abc123

# Cherry-pick and edit commit message
git cherry-pick -e abc123

3. Git Bisect

Binary search through commit history to find the commit that introduced a bug.

# Start bisect
git bisect start

# Mark current commit as bad
git bisect bad

# Mark known good commit
git bisect good v1.0.0

# Git will checkout middle commit - test it
# Then mark as good or bad
git bisect good  # or: git bisect bad

# Continue until bug found
# When done
git bisect reset

Automated Bisect:

# Use script to test automatically
git bisect start HEAD v1.0.0
git bisect run ./test.sh

# test.sh should exit 0 for good, 1-127 (except 125) for bad

4. Worktrees

Work on multiple branches simultaneously without stashing or switching.

# List existing worktrees
git worktree list

# Add new worktree for feature branch
git worktree add ../project-feature feature/new-feature

# Add worktree and create new branch
git worktree add -b bugfix/urgent ../project-hotfix main

# Remove worktree
git worktree remove ../project-feature

# Prune stale worktrees
git worktree prune

5. Reflog

Your safety net - tracks all ref movements, even deleted commits.

# View reflog
git reflog

# View reflog for specific branch
git reflog show feature/branch

# Restore deleted commit
git reflog
# Find commit hash
git checkout abc123
git branch recovered-branch

# Restore deleted branch
git reflog
git branch deleted-branch abc123

Practical Workflows

Workflow 1: Clean Up Feature Branch Before PR

# Start with feature branch
git checkout feature/user-auth

# Interactive rebase to clean history
git rebase -i main

# Example rebase operations:
# - Squash "fix typo" commits
# - Reword commit messages for clarity
# - Reorder commits logically
# - Drop unnecessary commits

# Force push cleaned branch (safe if no one else is using it)
git push --force-with-lease origin feature/user-auth

Workflow 2: Apply Hotfix to Multiple Releases

# Create fix on an authorized topic branch from the current target
git fetch origin main
git switch -c hotfix/security origin/main
git commit -m "fix: critical security patch"

# Apply to release branches

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