Moving Commits with Git Cherry-Pick

On the weekend, while working on NetNewsWire, I ran into a source-control situation that made me spend a lot of time learning about how to move Git commits from one branch to another.

For whatever reason, I made my changes on the main branch and, once the work was done, I opened a first pull request against the NetNewsWire/main branch. Maurice Parker kindly reminded me that the PR should be opened against the mac-candidate branch, so I closed that PR and took a look at the situation.

Here’s what my fork of the NetNewsWire repository looked like:

The branch named origin is my fork of the original, upstream, NetNewsWire repo. Here’s what the branch diagram needed to look like:

Right.

So, here’s something you should know about my experience with Git: so long as I stick to a very simple, branch-commit-merge strategy, everything’s fine. I’ve even figured out how to keep my forked origin updated and in sync with upstream repos, like a good contributor.

But anything more complicated than that? Ugh. 😬

I knew what I needed to do — I had to move my commits from my main branch, in order, onto my candidate branch, and then open a new PR. After spending about a half hour making a good, solid, mess of my fork, I finally stumbled upon the answer: Git cherry-pick.

Like almost anything on the official Git documentation site, I personally find the docs on cherry-picking unhelpful at best, inscrutable at worst — I’m more of a visual person, I guess, so I found this StackOverflow answer to be much more useful in figuring out what it means to cherry-pick a commit in Git.

The process is actually pretty straightforward:

# Switch to the branch you want to move the commits to:
% git checkout mac-candidate

# Cherry-pick each commit, in order, using their commit hash,
# until you've moved them all to the intended branch:
% git cherry-pick 12ab34c

That’s… about it. Like I said, though, I’m a visual person, so I found it helpful to do this in GitKraken (you can use this referral link if you’re interested in trying it out), where I can just right-click on the commit I want to move, choose cherry-pick from the context menu, and watch as it gets applied to my mac-candidate branch. It definitely made it easier to make sure I didn’t miss any commits or screw up the order.

Once that was done, all I had to do was open a new pull request (against the correct branch, this time) and the work was done!