Stash uncommitted changes with Git Stash

You are in the middle of developing a feature and suddenly your manager tells you to work on an urgent fix for a production bug! You want to create a new branch for the fix but git wouldn't let you as you have uncommited changes. How can you switch to a new branch without losing your local uncommitted changes? Git Stash to your rescue.

Say, I’ve two commits in my git repository:

$ git log --oneline --decorate --graph
* 10c532b (HEAD -> master) Add File2   <- Commit #1
* d19fe8d Add File1                    <- Commit #2

And I’ve those two files file1 and file2 in my directory.

$ ls
file1  file2

After I have added file2, I've made some changes to it that have not been committed yet, as you see from the output of git status below:

$ git status
On branch master
Changes not staged for commit:
  (use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
  (use "git checkout -- <file>..." to discard changes in working directo

        modified:   file2

no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")

At this stage, say I have to switch to a different branch or a different commit, I usually have two options. Either commit these changes or lose them by switching to the other commit. As I don’t want to pick either of those options, I will go with the third option available, which is Stashing.

Git stash, as the name indicates, lets you stash-away some changes temporarily. You can think of stashes as being "temporary commits".

You can stash your changes with the following command:

git stash save "Changes in file2"

To git stash, I pass in the command save along with a message. This message is similar to a commit messages, by which you can identify a particular stash.

You can do the same with just git stash as well. But with that, you will not be able to provide a stash message.

You can see the existing list of stashes with the list command:

$ git stash list
stash@{0}: On master: Changes in file2

That is the stash I’ve just created, and you can see the branch name master and the stash message I have given as well. The stash@{0} is the identifier for your stash.

Now that we have created the stash, to use it, we have two options.

1. apply — Adds the changes in stash to working directory but keeps the stash
2. pop — Adds the changes in stash to working directory and deletes the stash

To apply a stash:

git stash apply stash@{0}

This will still keep the stash, and you will see it in the output of the list command.

To pop a stash:

git stash pop stash@{0}

If you want to delete the stash, you can do:

git stash drop stash@{0}

And that will delete the stash.

Git stashes are a great way to quickly stow away your unsaved changes for some later use. Try this out and this can be a really useful tool in your development workflow. One way in which I use stashes is to make a change on multiple branches. I stash the necessary changes and then apply the stash on all of the branches. Pretty neat!

That is all for this article.

For more programming articles, checkout Freblogg, Freblogg/Git

Thanks for reading. See you again in the next article.

Image attribution:

Git Logo - Git Logo by Jason Long is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.