I began making changes to my codebase, not realizing I was on an old topic branch. To transfer them, I wanted to stash them and then apply them to a new branch off of master. I used git stash pop to transfer work-in-progress changes to this new branch, forgetting that I hadn't pulled new changes into master before creating the new branch. This resulted in a bunch of merge conflicts and loss of a clean stash of my changes (since I used pop).
Once I recreate the new branch correctly, how I can I recover my stashed changes to apply them properly?
Best Answer
As it turns out, Git is smart enough not to drop a stash if it doesn't apply cleanly. I was able to get to the desired state with the following steps:
- To unstage the merge conflicts:
git reset HEAD .(note the trailing dot) - To save the conflicted merge (just in case):
git stash - To return to master:
git checkout master - To pull latest changes:
git fetch upstream; git merge upstream/master - To correct my new branch:
git checkout new-branch; git rebase master - To apply the correct stashed changes (now 2nd on the stack):
git stash apply stash@{1}
Luckily git stash pop does not change the stash in the case of a conflict!
So nothing, to worry about, just clean up your code and try it again.
Say your codebase was clean before, you could go back to that state with: git checkout -f
Then do the stuff you forgot, e.g. git merge missing-branch
After that just fire git stash pop again and you get the same stash, that conflicted before.
Keep in mind: The stash is safe, however, uncommitted changes in the working directory are of course not. They can get messed up.
The simplest command, it works everywhere including git stash pop, git merge etc.
But careful! You'll lose all changes on untracked files. Tracked files stays intact
git reset --mergeInstructions here are a little complicated so I'm going to offer something more straightforward:
git reset HEAD --hardAbandon all changes to the current branch...Perform intermediary work as necessarygit stash popRe-pop the stash again at a later date when you're ready
git checkout -fmust work, if your previous state is clean.
CAUTION: Beware–you'll lose all untracked changes to your files.
If you're like me and had unstaged changes that you want to preserve, you can avoid losing that work by checking out a known stable version of each individual file from the stash. Hopefully those files are different than the ones you were working on. Also, this is why we use small commits as we go, dumb dumb.
git checkout main -- <file_with_conflicts>