Use the stash, Luke (git-stash)

I was in the middle of developing a new feature for the TurnKey Hub when I received a bug report that needed to be fixed.

What to do? Throw away my current changes? Checkout a clean branch? Of course not! Just stash my changes away, fix the bug, and get my changes back so I can continue development.

It's so simple and useful, I thought I'd share my notes in case others don't know about git-stash.

git-status      # we have a bunch of uncommitted changes
git-stash       # stashes away changes, reverts working copy to HEAD
git-status      # no uncommitted changes

... fix the bug

git-stash list  # see what we have stashed away
git-stash pop   # apply uncommitted changes back to working copy

The above makes simple use of the Git stash, but there is lots more you can do with it. Also remember that the stash acts like a stack which means you can store multiple stashes.

Comments (2)

git-xxx

Reply 1 2011-06-06

Hi Alon,

Git has this wonderful ability to look for commands in your path named git-* and let you run them as "git *" instead. For instance, I use the "Git Extras" at git://github.com/visionmedia/git-extras.git [see https://github.com/visionmedia/git-extras#readme for documentation] and since they're in my path, they just work.

I just wanted to say that when you are showing example git commands, generally you would say "git stash" rather than "git-stash".

Reid

git stash

Reply 2 2011-06-08

Juan, instead of temporary comit + reset HEAD^, I just use stash.

# working on branch "master"
git stash
git checkout -b hotfix
# fix the bug
git commit -a
git checkout master

git merge hotfix
git stash apply
# or "git stash pop" if you are confident

Doesn't that make sense?