Git Cherrypicking

Links: 106 Git Index

---

Cherry-picking

• Cherry-pick a very straightforward way of saying that you would like to copy a series of commits below your current location (HEAD).
• Initial state:
  • 

We first checkout the branch where we want the specific commits and then run the cherrypick command

• git cherry-pick C2 C4
  • 
  • We wanted commits C2 and C4 and git plopped them down right below us.
• Order matters in cherry picking
  • 
• Git cherry-pick is great when you know which commits you want (and you know their corresponding hashes)

Interactive Rebasing

• Initial state:
  • 
• git rebase -i HEAD~4
  • After some commit reordering
  • 

Do NOT use Interactive Rebase on commits that you've already pushed/shared on a remote repository

Instead, use it for cleaning up your local commit history before merging it into a shared team branch.

Use cases

• Cherry-picking should only be used in very specific situations
• Your main way of integration should always be merge and rebase.

Example 1

• Problem Statement:
  • I'm trying to track down a bug but it is quite elusive. In order to aid in my detective work, I put in a few debug commands and a few print statements. All of these debugging/print statements are in their own commits. Finally I track down the bug, fix it, and rejoice!
  • Only problem is that I now need to get my bugFix back into the main branch. If I simply fast-forwarded main, then main would get all my debug statements which is undesirable. There has to be another way...
• In this example could have been done using either interactive rebasing or cherry-picking
  • 
• Solution : git checkout main; git cherry-pick c4

Example 2

• You made a commit to the main branch whereas it should have been on the feature branch
  • 

---

Last updated: 2022-06-21