How to cleanup git history removing certain commits after they've been pushed?

Question

What I'm trying to do:

I completed a feature.

git add -A; git commit -m "feature A complete"

Then I realized I missed some things.

git add -A; git commit -m "feature A missed something 1"
git add -A; git commit -m "feature A missed something 2"
git add -A; git commit -m "feature A missed something 3"

Now my history looks like this:

A238ad1 feature A missed something 3
3238adX feature A missed something 2
1238ad7 feature A missed something 1
111AAA2 feature A complete

I want it to look like this:

111AAA2 feature A complete

With all the missed something commits merged into the feature A complete commit.

I know git rebase -i HEAD~4 is the right way to go, but it doesn't actually remove the bad commits to clean up the history.

I noticed in some other articles there's a git commit --fixup command and a git rebase -i --autosquash, but I'm not getting it to work properly. I'm sure this is super easy, I'm just out of it today.

Answer 1

In this case use interactive rebase

This can be initiated using

git rebase -i 

followed by number of heads you want to include

git rebase -i HEAD~5

where HEAD~5 indicates last 5 commits

Then you can use further options to squash your commits into one and edit the message. Just instead of pick option write squash instead

So here you see, I change option pick for s which is a shortcut for squash. When I save and close this file, interactive rebase will be initiated and commits which I indicated for squashing will be squashed into 21b4e04 Fixed missing bad practice. After squashing, it will ask you to enter a new commit message. Enter your new message and hit enter and you are done.