git

How to move a commit to another branch in git

sometimes you can forget to create a branch for a given feature and you have done a lot of work on that branch , so moving commits will save you from manually copying changes.

Slimane amiar

Jan 26, 2023 • 1 min read

let say i am working on master branch and i started adding a feature that need a separate branch but i forgot to create that branch and did the changes on master, so rather than manually copying the changes to the new branch feature-a we can easily move the commits of that feature to feature-a and clean master

git init
touch a.txt
echo hello > a.txt
git add a.txt
git commit -m'hello'
echo 'new feature' > a.txt
git add a.txt
git commit -m'new feature'

git log


commit 17a49036e9b19a0aa4de408e2386139fcab4fdeb (HEAD -> master, feature-a)
Author: slimane amiar <slimaneamiar@talik.io>
Date:   Wed Jan 25 06:46:55 2023 +0100

    new feature

commit 06ac1512c3f6fafdf084469201cb7c5c40033134
Author: slimane amiar <slimaneamiar@talik.io>
Date:   Wed Jan 25 06:46:16 2023 +0100

    hello

git checkout -b feature-a
git cherry-pick 17a49036e9b19a0aa4de408e2386139fcab4fdeb
git checkout master
git reset --hard 06ac1512c3f6fafdf084469201cb7c5c40033134

we check the log on feature-a we see that the commit has moved to it

commit 17a49036e9b19a0aa4de408e2386139fcab4fdeb (HEAD -> feature-a)
Author: slimane amiar <slimaneamiar@talik.io>
Date:   Wed Jan 25 06:46:55 2023 +0100

    new feature

commit 06ac1512c3f6fafdf084469201cb7c5c40033134 (master)
Author: slimane amiar <slimaneamiar@talik.io>
Date:   Wed Jan 25 06:46:16 2023 +0100

    hello

if we go back to master we see that the commit is not on the master

git log

commit 06ac1512c3f6fafdf084469201cb7c5c40033134 (HEAD -> master)
Author: slimane amiar <slimaneamiar@talik.io>
Date:   Wed Jan 25 06:46:16 2023 +0100

    hello

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