I use git as a local source control system mostly for history and diff tracking. I still want to use rebase to do fixup / squash on WIP commits that I will make periodically. When I try to do git rebase -i though, I get the following:

There is no tracking information for the current branch.
Please specify which branch you want to rebase against.
See git-rebase(1) for details

    git rebase <branch>



It seems like git doesn't expect you to use interactive rebase without an upstream remote? How do I do that?


git rebase -i in shorthand, without specifying a destination branch, will make git assume that you are trying to rebase against a remote branch tracked by your branch. That's why the error message is mentioning stuff about remotes.

When you do specify a target, git will rebase against that commit-ish:

git rebase -i <commit-ish>
  • 1
    You can track any branch, local or remote.
    – jthill
    Jun 3 '15 at 18:01
  • Yeah - tried to edit the answer to point that out, because I basically re-edited my original self answer to be the same. HEAD~3 here is not an essential part of the syntax, it's just one (of any) possible commit refs.
    – mcw
    Jun 3 '15 at 19:40
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    HEAD~3 is only there because your original answer attemps to rebase on HEAD~3, and going through unnecessary steps to acheive it. I can put commit-ish if you prefer... Jun 3 '15 at 20:06
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    This answer should explain what "commit-ish" means or at least link to it like mcw0933's comment on the other answer Oct 22 '18 at 22:02

So in short - if you have 3 local commits and you now want to interactively rebase/squash/etc them:

git rebase -i HEAD~3

(See Sébastien's explanation !)

  • 1
    Yup - thanks @MikeW. That is one concrete example of what you can use for the "commit-ish" parameter to git. For anyone unfamiliar with what a "commit-ish" is... check out this other SO answer: stackoverflow.com/questions/23303549/…
    – mcw
    Nov 29 '16 at 2:00

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