[git] How to cherry-pick from a remote branch?

I'm having trouble performing a cherry-pick. On my local machine, I'm currently on my "master" branch. I want to cherry-pick in a commit from another branch, named "zebra". The "zebra" branch is a remote branch.

So git status:

# On branch master
nothing to commit (working directory clean)

Ok, now I try to cherry-pick the commit I want:

git cherry-pick xyz
fatal: bad object xyz

where "xyz" is the signature of the commit I'm interested in, that happened on branch "zebra".

So the first obvious question is, why can't git find the commit I'm referencing? I don't really understand how this is working in the first place to be honest. Does git store something like a database of commits locally in my working directory, for all other branches? When executing the cherry-pick command, does it go and search that local database to find the commit I'm talking about?

Since "zebra" is a remote branch, I was thinking I don't have its data locally. So I switched branches:

git checkout zebra
Switched to branch 'zebra'

So now here on my local machine, I can see that the files in the directory reflect zebra's state correctly. I switch back to master, try to cherry-pick again (hoping the commit data is available now), but I get the same problem.

I've got a fundamental misunderstanding of what's going on here, any help would be great.

After merging a development branch to master, I usually delete the development branch. However, if I want to cherry pick the commits in the development branch, I have to use the merge commit hash to avoid "bad object" error.

This can also be easily achieved with SourceTree:

• checkout your master branch
• open the "Log / History" tab
• locate the xyz commit and right click on it
• click on "Merge..."

done :)

I had this error returned after using the commit id from a pull request commit id tab. That commit was subsequently squashed and merged. In the github pull request, look for this text: "merged commit xxxxxxx into..." instead of attempting to use the commit ids from the commits tab.

I solved this issue by going on the branch with the commit I want to cherry pick.

git checkout <branch With Commit To Cherry-Pick>

use log to find commit hash

git log

when you've found your hash cut and paste on note pad. if using command just scroll up to get the hash then checkout the branch you want to place the commit in.

git checkout < branch I Want To Place My Cherry-Picked-Hash In>

finally call cherry-pick from git (note) -x is to append your cherry-pick message to the original. "When recording the commit, append a line that says "(cherry picked from commit …?)" to the original commit message in order to indicate which commit this change was cherry-picked from. "

git cherry-pick -x <your hash commit to add to the current branch>

Need to pull both branch data on your local drive first.

What is happening is your trying to cherry-pick from branch-a to branch-b, where in you are currently on branch-b, but the local copy of branch-a is not updated yet (you need to perform a git pull on both branches first).

steps:
- git checkout branch-a
- git pull origin branch-a
- git checkout branch-b
- git pull origin branch-b
- git cherry-pick <hash>

output:
[branch-b <hash>] log data
Author: Author <Author
1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 3 deletions(-)

If you have fetched, yet this still happens, the following might be a reason.

It can happen that the commit you are trying to pick, is no longer belonging to any branch. This may happen when you rebase.

In such case, at the remote repo:

1. git checkout xxxxx
2. git checkout -b temp-branch

Then in your repo, fetch again. The new branch will be fetched, including that commit.

Adding remote repo (as "foo") from which we want to cherry-pick

$ git remote add foo git://github.com/foo/bar.git

Fetch their branches

$ git fetch foo

List their commits (this should list all commits in the fetched foo)

$ git log foo/master

Cherry-pick the commit you need

$ git cherry-pick 97fedac

The commit should be present in your local, check by using git log.

If the commit is not present then try git fetch to update the local with the latest remote.

Just as an addendum to OP accepted answer:

If you having issues with

fatal: bad object xxxxx

that's because you don't have access to that commit. Which means you don't have that repo stored locally. Then:

git remote add LABEL_FOR_THE_REPO REPO_YOU_WANT_THE_COMMIT_FROM
git fetch LABEL_FOR_THE_REPO
git cherry-pick xxxxxxx

Where xxxxxxx is the commit hash you want.