Stash¶

When would you use git stash?

• Imagine you quickly need to change context within the repository, because a colleague asks for help, but the code changes you are currently working on are not yet ready to commit.
  • Stash them! This removes them from your pending changes, and allows you to help your colleague. Afterwards, you can retrieve your work from the stash and continue.
• Imagine you want to commit changes for a feature you have been working on, but the upstream branch of this feature has been updated by a colleague.
  • Stash them! This removes them from your pending changes, allowing you to fetch and merge the upstream changes. Afterwards, you can retrieve your work from the stash and carry on.

Example: git stash¶

# Stage some arbitrary changes in the INDEX
git add script.py
git add __init__.py
git add LICENSE

# Stash the changes
git stash

# Create the new branch and check it out
git branch feature/awesome
git checkout feature/awesome

# List all stashes to find index number associated with your stash
git stash list

# Apply the stash to the branch
git stash apply 0

# Commit the changes
git commit -m "From stash"

# Clean up the stash
git stash drop 0

I hacked together the visualisation below to give you some visual representation of what is going on. It is not entirely accurate, because Mermaid graphs do not support git stash, but it conveys the general idea.

gitGraph
  commit id: "A"
  commit type: REVERSE id: "B"
  commit type: REVERSE id: "C"
  branch stash
  cherry-pick id: "B"
  cherry-pick id: "C"
  branch feature/awesome
  commit type: HIGHLIGHT id: "From stash"