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Git: stashing

Stashing is a great tool to make life with branches a bit more fluent.

Rationale

Scenario: you're building a new feature in a dedicated branch, the feature is far from being ready, all good under the sun. But your blissful development peace is broken by gentle knock to shoulder by quality assurance, they have come up with a critical bug that needs your attention, urgently. Essentially, what you want is: switch to master, fix the bug, deploy, and continue with your feature. But, you can't, because you got a half assed feature in the open branch, and you’d have to commit the changes before switching branches, but forcefully committing unfinished feature is not really to your liking. That's when you would stash the made changes, safely switch branches, switch back to feature branch, and revive the stash.

In a nutshell:

• Dirty tree in a feature branch
• Stash changes
• Checkout another branch
• Hack hack hack... and commit
• Checkout feature branch
• Revive the stash

Stashing

The status of your project might look something like this:

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

    modified:   my-project/dist/css/style.css
    modified:   my-project/src/sass/base/_constants.scss
    modified:   my-project/src/sass/elements/_typo.scss

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

Now if $ git stash is applied all the changes are stashed into a secure area:

$ git stash
Saved working directory and index state WIP on new-security-page: dc7a6dc New new security page
HEAD is now at dc7a6dc New new feature thingy

Status shows a clean tree:

$ git status
# On branch master
nothing to commit, working directory clean

Getting the stash back

To get the most resent stash back, apply it:

$ git stash apply

Even better, pop it back, pop will apply the latest stash and then destroy it:

$ git stash pop

To list all stash:

$ git stash list
stash@{0}: WIP on new-feature-thingy: dc7a6dc New new security page
stash@{1}: WIP on master: c5d658f Build JS
stash@{2}: WIP on new-feature-thingy: 654d7aa Fix a thing

To get an older stash back, use the stash name as parameter for the apply command:

$ git stash apply stash@{2}

Getting rid of old stashes

Refer a stash name in the git stash drop command:

$ git stash drop stash@{0}
Dropped stash@{0} (79d291f180ac9be18fdce2733ee7635bde6120ca)