---
title: Making Git work the way you want
date: 2024-03-31
permalink: archive/2024/03/31/making-git-work-the-way-you-want
tags:
    - software-development
    - git
cta: ~
snippet: |
    Merge or rebase - which do you use?
---

Another question that followed my recent Git emails was, " I assume you use rebase over merge?"

The short answer is "yes". I like to keep the history of my repositories clean and simple to read by keeping the logs linear and not full of merge commits.

The longer answer is that I do merges, but only fast-forward merges, at least by default.

If, when merging, Git can fast-forward my branch to the latest commit without creating a merge commit, it will do so.

If not, I can then rebase my changes to make them linear and fast-forwardable. Alternatively, if the commits have already been pushed and cannot be overwritten, I can explicitly allow a non-fast-forward merge in that situation.

I have Git configured to work this way as that's how I want it to work, and that configurability is something I like about Git.

If you want to see how I have Git configured, my settings are in [my dotfiles repository][dotfiles] (note this file is written in the Nix language as I use Nix to manage my configuration).

If you're working in a team, I'd suggest having a common configuration for everyone and defined rules for how you're going to use Git (branch names, merge or rebase, etc) to avoid inconsistencies.

[dotfiles]: https://github.com/opdavies/dotfiles.nix/blob/462eff64f227332d58c7c3652eeaa88b692c064d/lib/shared/modules/git.nix#L95-L135