I'm frequently squashing all the commits on a feature branch before committing to master. Here's what I do currently:
git checkout master
git merge --squash {branch}
git commit -m "{feature_summary}"
Is there an git alias I can use to do this? The aliases I'm familiar with (e.g. stashes = stash list or uncommit = reset --soft HEAD~1) don't store variables, and in this case the second command needs to know which branch we came from at the beginning of the commands, so I imagine has to store this information.
Ideally I'd like a git alias such as git squash which does all those commands. I'm fine with either expecting a string as the commit message, or opening an editor to enter the message.
You can use the @{-1} construct which means "last checked out branch", and pass a parameter to an ad-hoc bash function :
# ms for merge-squash but call it as you prefer
git config --global alias.ms '!f() { git checkout master && git merge --squash @{-1} && git commit -m "$1"; }; f'
then an example use could be, from your feature branch :
git ms "My commit message"