An Introduction to Stashing in Git

Problem

• Imagine a Scenario where you are on the master branch and you make a new branch and switch to it
• You do some new work but don’t make any commits. What happens when you switch back to master?
  1. My changes come with me to the destination branch
  2. Git won't let me switch if it detects potential conflicts so it advises us to either commit or stash them

Stashing

• Git provides an easy way of stashing these uncommitted changes so that we can return to them later, without having to make unnecessary commits.
• git stash is super useful command that helps you save changes that you are not yet ready to commit. You can stash changes and then come back to them later. Now that you have stashed my changes, you can switch branches, create new commits, etc.
• Running git stash will take all uncommitted changes (staged and unstaged) and stash them, reverting the changes in your working copy. We don’t see the changes but they are saved.
• Use git stash pop to remove the most recently stashed changes in your stash and re-apply them to your working copy.
• You can use git stash apply to apply whatever is stashed away, without removing it from the stash. This can be useful if you want to apply stashed changes to multiple branches

Stashing Multiple Times

• You can add multiple stashes onto the stack of stashes. They will all be stashed in the order you added them.
• Run git stash list to view all stashes
• Git assumes you want to apply the most recent stash when you run git stash apply, but you can also specify a particular stash like git stash apply <stash-id>
• To delete a particular stash, you can use git stash drop <stash-id>
• To clear out all stashes, run git stash clear