How to cherry-pick from a remote branch

Question

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

User · Answer

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(-)

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

Since  zebra  is a remote branch  I was thinking I don t have its data   locally    You are correct that you don t have the right data  but tried to resolve it in the wrong way  To collect data locally from a remote source  you need to use git fetch  When you did git checkout zebra you switched to whatever the state of that branch was the last time you fetched  So fetch from the remote first     fetch just the one remote git fetch  lt remote gt    or fetch from all remotes git fetch --all   make sure you re back on the branch you want to cherry-pick to git cherry-pick xyz

User · Answer

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    git checkout xxxxx git checkout -b temp-branch   Then in your repo  fetch again  The new branch will be fetched  including that commit

User · Answer

I solved this issue by going on the branch with the commit I want to cherry pick   git checkout  lt branch With Commit To Cherry-Pick gt    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  lt  branch I Want To Place My Cherry-Picked-Hash In gt    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  lt your hash commit to add to the current branch gt

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

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

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