Sometimes I have a bunch of small commits in a feature branch, and I'd like to just squash them all together, but not merge into the parent branch yet.
I know I can (in this example parent branch is master):
git rebase -i master
and then tag all of the commits after the first as "squash".
Is there a way to get the same result non-interactively?
Essentially I want to create a new commit whose tree is identical to the tree now at the head of my feature branch and whose parent is the ancestor commit that I've specified (eg: master), and then change the feature branch to point at that new commit. There should never be any conflicts (I occasionally get some with rebase -i), and with -m should be completely non-interactive. Ideally, without -m the commit message should default to a concatenation of the commits being squashed.
How can I do this?
My take to squash is to use git reset --soft. Say you want to squash the last 5 commits:
git reset --soft HEAD~5
git commit -m "Feature X"
And if you also want to rebase all of that done in a (almost) single shot, you can still do it with git reset --soft