Git Stashing

[treehouse presents] 0:00 [Quick Tips Git Stashing with Tommy Morgan] 0:01 In version control, best practice is to commit your work in discreet chunks. 0:05 Your project history will make the most sense and hence be easiest to work with 0:10 if each of your commits represents a functional and independent change to your project. 0:14 Unfortunately, real life isn't always that clean. 0:18 Sometimes you're half-done crafting a great commit when you get interrupted. 0:22 Perhaps there's an urgent bug that needs your attention 0:27 or you have to switch to a different branch to help a teammate troubleshoot an issue. 0:29 Your half-finished work will only get in the way, but what do you do with it? 0:33 It's not finished so committing it would make your project history needlessly complicated. 0:37 At the same time, you've already spend a lot of time on it 0:41 so it's wasteful to have to delete it. 0:45 Fortunately for us, the Git Version Control System 0:47 provides a third option with the git stash command. 0:50 [Dealing with Interruptions] In this scenario, I've got my project 0:53 and I started doing work on a new task. 0:57 You can see if I run git status that I have several unstaged changes. 0:59 In a typical situation, I would continue working on this change until it's ready to commit 1:04 but when you're working on a project, situations are rarely typical. 1:09 A coworker of mine has just walked over to ask me 1:13 to take a look at some weird bug in the code we're working on, 1:16 but all these unfinished changes are preventing me from being able to see the same behavior that he's seeing. 1:19 I need to get these changes out of the way, but how? 1:23 I could commit them but they're not finished and that would mess up my clean project history. 1:27 I could just delete the changes, but then I'd lose all the work I was doing. 1:31 Thankfully, I have a third option. 1:35 I can stash the changes with git stash. 1:38 If we look at git status again, you can see 1:42 that all of my unstaged changes from before are gone, 1:44 so now I can help my coworker with the problem he was having. 1:47 But where did my changes go? 1:50 They've been stashed away by Git 1:53 and now that I am done helping my teammate, 1:56 I can use git/stash/apply to bring them back. 1:57 [OOPS! Wrong Branch] Now, I've started work on another new feature. 2:01 If we run git status, we can see all of my unstaged changes so far 2:04 but wait! I'm still on master! 2:08 I really want to be doing this on a new branch specific for this feature 2:11 at least until I'm finished with it. 2:14 Thanks to git stash, this isn't a problem. 2:17 I'll use git stash to stash my changes, 2:20 git checkout to create a new branch, 2:23 and then git stash apply to bring my changes back again. 2:29 With 3 quick commands, I was able to create a new branch 2:33 and move all of my in-progress work over without missing a beat. 2:35 [What if...] So I have been working on my new feature but it's 2:39 a really complicated concept, and I'm not sure the idea that I had 2:42 for how to build this is a great one. 2:45 I've got another idea I want to try, even though I'm in the middle of trying my first thought. 2:47 It's okay. I'll just use git stash to save the work I have in progress and start off on my new idea. 2:53 Now I'm down this second road and it doesn't really look a lot better to me. 3:00 I think I'm going to switch back to my first attempt, 3:04 try to finish that a little bit more, and see if it grows on me. 3:06 So I'll just stash my changes—oh wait! 3:09 I just stashed this second set of changes over the top of my first. 3:14 How can I get at that older stash? 3:18 If I run git stash list, I can see a list of all the stashes for this repository, just the 2. 3:20 You can see that they have special labels. 3:26 The syntax is a little weird but the important part is the number 3:29 that gives us an indication of the order in which the stashes were applied. 3:33 We can provide that special label to the git stash apply command 3:36 just like this— 3:40 in order to retrieve changes from a specific stash. 3:43 Stashes and git are great temporary storage for your changes 3:46 and you'll only find more uses for them as you spend more time with Git. 3:51 Whether you were interrupted by an urgent request for help from a teammate 3:54 or even just realized that you were working in the wrong branch, 3:58 Git stash is a huge time saver. 4:01

You need to sign up for Treehouse in order to set up Workspace

Sign up