Learn Git Rebase Interactively

If you’ve ever wondered what a rebase is, then you could try and read up on it and understand it from the man pages. Many people struggle with this, and I was among them. The man pages have been improved lately, but are still daunting to the casual user.

A more effective way to learn is to be thrown into it at the deep end by being forced to do it at work. Unfortunately this can be a terrible way to learn as you are panicked about breaking something in some way you don’t understand.

So I came up with an interactive tutorial that you can run to learn what a rebase is.

Run The Tutorial

Running the tutorial has only two dependencies: pip and docker.

If you have those, then run:

pip install shutit # You might need sudo for this, depending on your pip setup
git clone https://github.com/ianmiell/git-rebase-tutorial
cd git-rebase-tutorial
./run.sh

Video

Here’s a demo of it in action:

Features

At any point, you can hit these button combinations (hit both at the same time, CTRL key first):

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CTRL-]

This submits your current state for checking.

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CTRL-h

Gives you a hint.

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CTRL-g

Restores the state of the tutorial to a pristine state at this stage.

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CTRL-s

Skips the current stage of the tutorial.

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CTRL-q

Quits the ShutIt session.

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Problems?

Raise an issue here.

If you can reproduce with ./run.sh -l debug and post the output, then that’s ideal.

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If you like this post, you might like  Learn Git the Hard Way, Learn Bash the Hard Way or Docker in Practice

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