What Rebase Does

Rebase onto main

This replays your branch's commits on top of the latest main, one by one, instead of creating a merge commit.

git switch feature/login
git rebase main

Output:

Successfully rebased and updated refs/heads/feature/login.

Rebase vs merge

Merge preserves history exactly as it happened, with branches visible. Rebase rewrites commit history into a straight, linear line — cleaner to read, but the commits get new hashes.

Never rebase shared history

Since rebase rewrites commits, never rebase a branch that others have already pulled — it forces everyone to fix their history. Rebase only your own unpushed local work.