Sometimes you have pushed a whole bunch of commits and want to create a PR from your branch. The problem is your commits are messy and people will judge you for it when they are reviewing your PR.

How I do it now

Use interactive rebase.

git switch <branch-you-want-to-squash>

Let’s say you want to squash this and merge into develop

git rebase -i develop

Change everything to fixup except the first

pick  a1b2c3  Add login form
fixup d4e5f6  Fix styling
fixup 789abc  Add forgot password link

If you don’t do anything now and just commit you will get the commit message of the first commit you are keeping.

How I used to do it

git checkout my_branch
git reset --soft HEAD~{NUMBER_OF_COMMITS}
git commit
git push --force origin my_branch

To count the number of commits in your current branch compared to develop you can do this

git rev-list --count develop..HEAD