Git-Mastery: Lessons

Cherry-picking is another way to synchronize branches, by applying specific commits from one branch onto another.

Unlike merging or rebasing — which bring over all changes since the branches diverged — cherry-picking lets you choose individual commits and apply just those, one at a time, to your current branch. This is useful when you want to bring over a bug fix or a small feature from another branch without merging the entire branch history.

Because cherry-picking copies only the chosen commits, it creates new commits on your branch with the same changes but different SHA values.

Suppose we have the following revision graph, and we want to bring over the changes introduced in m3 (in the main branch) onto the feature branch.

gitGraph
    %%{init: { 'theme': 'default', 'gitGraph': {'mainBranchName': 'main'}} }%%
    commit id: "m1"
    branch feature
    checkout feature
    commit id: "f1"
    checkout main
    commit id: "m2"
    commit id: "m3" type: HIGHLIGHT
    commit id: "[main] m4"
    checkout feature
    commit id: "[HEAD → feature] f2"

After cherry-picking m3 onto the feature branch, the revision graph should look like the following:

gitGraph
%%{init: { 'theme': 'default', 'gitGraph': {'mainBranchName': 'main'}} }%%
    commit id: "m1"
    branch feature
    checkout feature
    commit id: "f1"
    checkout main
    commit id: "m2"
    commit id: "m3" type: HIGHLIGHT
    commit id: "[main] m4"
    checkout feature
    commit id: "f2"
    commit id: "[HEAD → feature] m3a" type: HIGHLIGHT

Note how it makes the changes from m3 available from that point on in the feature branch, with minimal changes to the revision graph. Also note that the new commit m3a contains the same changes as m3, but it will be a different Git object with a different SHA value.

Cherry-picking is another Git operation that can result in conflicts, i.e., if the changes in the cherry-picked commit conflict with the changes in the receiving branch.

mkdir samplerepo-sync-cherry
cd samplerepo-sync-cherry
git init -b main

echo "v1" > app.txt
git add .
git commit -m "m1: initial commit"

git switch -c feature
echo "feature work" >> feature.txt
git add .
git commit -m "f1: start feature"

git switch main
echo "update" > update.txt
git add .
git commit -m "m2: update app"

echo "urgent fix" > bugfix.txt
git add .
git commit -m "m3: urgent bug fix"

echo "more" > more.txt
git add .
git commit -m "m4: more work"

git switch feature
echo "more feature work" >> feature.txt
git commit -am "f2: continue feature"

    

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git log --oneline main

    

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a1b2c3d (main) m4: more work
9f8e7d6 m3: urgent bug fix
5c4b3a2 m2: update app
1a2b3c4 m1: initial commit

    

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git switch feature
git cherry-pick 9f8e7d6

    

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