About interactive rebases

Interactive rebases provide a manual way of rewriting the history of your repository. The changes associated to the commits specified in your rebase range are reapplied at the top of the given base target. During an interactive rebase, you can intervene in this process and rearrange the order; drop some commits; modify commit messages and file changes; squash some commits together -- or split them apart.

This is one way to remove secrets that should never have been added to the repository from the history again. Note that if a remote is involved, this involves a forced push of the rewritten branch (plus pruning / garbage collecting on the server end, if you really want it gone). In addition, everyone with local copies of the repository needs to replace their version with the one with the rewritten history... a long and tedious process.

But, in any case, we are here to learn!