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Cherry picking

It may happen that you have accidentally committed a change into the wrong branch or that, in hindsight, some prior commits actually make more sense in another branch. This is where cherry picking comes in.

Where git rebase appends all commits of one branch onto another branch, git cherry-pick lets you choose which specific comments you want to 'copy' to another branch.

Info

While git rebase is destructive, git cherry-pick is not. After cherry-picking the commits you want, the original branch - and commits - still exist exactly as they were.

Example: git cherry-pick

The visualisation below is more or less the same as the merging example in the previous section. However, this time, we were accidentally checked out in the main branch when we committed the commit with hash damn.

gitGraph
  commit id: "main_1"
  commit id: "main_2"
  branch development
  commit id: "dev_1"
  checkout main
  commit type: HIGHLIGHT id: "damn"
  checkout development
  commit id: "dev_2"
  commit id: "dev_3"
  checkout main

In order to fix this, we will use git cherry-pick:

# Ensure the branch we want to cherry pick the comment to is checked out
git switch development

# Cherry pick the commit we want to move to 'development'
git cherry-pick damn

gitGraph
  commit id: "main_1"
  commit id: "main_2"
  branch development
  commit id: "dev_1"
  checkout main
  commit type: HIGHLIGHT id: "damn"
  checkout development
  commit id: "dev_2"
  commit id: "dev_3"
  cherry-pick id: "damn"
  checkout main

The commit has now been successfully copied to the development branch. However, note that it also still exists on the main branch. This is the nature of Git: it essentially attempts to preserve as much history as possible.

However, if you do not want this commit in main, it is possible to remove it by entirely rewriting history. I'll discuss this in the next section.