Git: Commands

Set Upstream

git branch -a
git checkout main
git branch
git remote add upstream https://github.com/x/y.git
git pull upstream main

Squash all commits

git switch yourBranch
git reset --soft $(git merge-base main HEAD)
git commit -m "Squash commits"

Remove files ignored (.gitignore) but still checked in

You can remove them from the repository manually:

git rm --cached file1 file2 dir/file3

Or, if you have a lot of files:

git rm --cached `git ls-files -i -c --exclude-from=.gitignore`

But this doesn’t seem to work in Git Bash on Windows. It produces an error message. The following works better (-d '\n' to split input line by line):

git ls-files -i -c --exclude-from=.gitignore | xargs -d '\n' git rm --cached

If you are using PowerShell on Windows this works too (handles spaces in path and filenames):

git ls-files -i -c --exclude-from=.gitignore | %{git rm --cached $_}

Regarding rewriting the whole history without these files, I highly doubt there’s an _automatic_way to do it.