Dealing With a Scenario

Scenario#

Here is a basic example of a change I want to “stash”:

1   mkdir lgthw_git_stash_1
2   cd lgthw_git_stash_1
3   git init
4   echo 'Some content' > file1
5   git add file1
6   git commit -am initial
7   echo 'Some changes I am not sure about' >> file1

Now imagine I’m in the middle of some work, and Alice lets me know that there’s an important update to the code that I need to pull from BitBucket.

First, you can see what changes you have made locally with git diff:

8   git diff

Stashing changes#

To store away these changes locally, run git stash. Run the following three commands in the terminal given below.

9   git stash

A quick git status confirms that your working directory is “clean”:

10  git status

What happened to your change? If you are interested, you can run the following command to view the graph:

11  git log --graph --all --decorate

As you can see, git stash has committed the state of the index and then committed the local change to the refs/stash branch and merged them as a child of the HEAD on a new refs/stash branch.

Don’t worry too much about the details yet; it has basically stored all the changes you’ve made (but not committed), ready to be re-applied.

The stash branch is a special one that is kept local to your repository. The “commit” message WIP on master and index on master is added automatically for you.

The master branch is still where it was before you stashed, and the HEAD pointer is pointed at the master branch.

I can now do my other work (in this case, pulling the latest changes from a remote. Remember, we will cover remotes in a later section) without concern for whether it conflicts with those changes.

Retrieving stash list#

You can see your “stash list” by running this command:

12  git stash list

Popping stashed work#

Once ready, you can re-apply those changes on the same codebase by running git stash pop:

13  git stash pop

It “pops” the zero-numbered change off the stash stack and restores the changes I stashed, applied to wherever I’ve ended up.

What’s a Stack?
A stack is a computer science concept of a series of items stored in such a way that you can “push” an item to the top of it for any number of times and then “pop” an item off the top until it’s empty. When you pop, you only get the most recent item that was pushed on. This means that when you pop your Git stash, you get the most recent one you pushed (which is likely to be what you wanted).