How to cherry pick a range of commits and merge into another branch

Question

I have the following repository layout    master branch  production  integration working   What I want to achieve is to cherry pick a range of commits from the working branch and merge it into the integration branch  I pretty new to git and I can t figure out how to exactly do this  the cherry picking of commit ranges in one operation not the merging  without messing the repository up  Any pointers or thoughts on this  Thanks

User · Answer

Are you sure you don t want to actually merge the branches  If the working branch has some recent commits you don t want  you can just create a new branch with a HEAD at the point you want   Now  if you really do want to cherry-pick a range of commits  for whatever reason  an elegant way to do this is to just pull of a patchset and apply it to your new integration branch   git format-patch A  B git checkout integration git am   patch   This is essentially what git-rebase is doing anyway  but without the need to play games  You can add --3way to git-am if you need to merge  Make sure there are no other   patch files already in the directory where you do this  if you follow the instructions verbatim

User · Answer

As of git v1 7 2 cherry pick can accept a range of commits      git cherry-pick learned to pick a range of commits  e g  cherry-pick A  B and cherry-pick --stdin   so did git revert  these do not support the nicer sequencing control rebase  -i  has  though

User · Answer

I have tested that some days ago  after reading the  very clear explanation of Vonc    My steps  Start   Branch dev   A B C D E F G H I J Branch target  A B C D I don t want E nor H   Steps to copy features without the step E and H in the branch dev feature wo E H   git checkout dev git checkout -b dev feature wo E H git rebase --interactive --rebase-merges --no-ff D where I put drop front of E and H in the rebase editor resolve conflicts  continue and commit   Steps to copy the the branch dev feature wo E H on target    git checkout target git merge --no-ff --no-commit  dev feature wo E H resolve conflicts  continue and commit   Some remarks   I ve done that because of too much cherry-pick in the days before  git cherry-pick is powerful and simple but    it creates duplicates commits  and when I want to merge I have to resolve conflicts of the initial commits and duplicates commits  so for one or two cherry-pick  it s OK to  cherry-picking  but for more  it s too verbose and the branch will become too complex  In my mind the steps I ve done are more clear than git rebase --onto

User · Answer

When it comes to a range of commits  cherry-picking is was not practical  As mentioned below by Keith Kim  Git 1 7 2  introduced the ability to cherry-pick a range of commits  but you still need to be aware of the consequence of cherry-picking for future merge   git cherry-pick quot  learned to pick a range of commits  e g   quot cherry-pick A  B quot  and  quot cherry-pick --stdin quot    so did  quot git revert quot   these do not support the nicer sequencing control  quot rebase  -i  quot  has  though   damian comments and warns us   In the  quot cherry-pick A  B quot  form  A should be older than B  If they re the wrong order the command will silently fail   If you want to pick the range B through D  including B  that would be B   D  instead of B  D   See  quot Git create branch from range of previous commits  quot  as an illustration  As Jubobs mentions in the comments   This assumes that B is not a root commit  you ll get an  quot unknown revision quot  error otherwise   Note  as of Git 2 9 x 2 10  Q3 2016   you can cherry-pick a range of commit directly on an orphan branch  empty head   see  quot How to make existing branch an orphan in git quot    Original answer  January 2010  A rebase --onto would be better  where you replay the given range of commit on top of your integration branch  as Charles Bailey described here   also  look for  quot Here is how you would transplant a topic branch based on one branch to another quot  in the git rebase man page  to see a practical example of git rebase --onto  If your current branch is integration     Checkout a new temporary branch at the current location git checkout -b tmp    Move the integration branch to the head of the new patchset git branch -f integration last SHA-1 of working branch range    Rebase the patchset onto tmp  the old location of integration git rebase --onto tmp first SHA-1 of working branch range 1 integration  That will replay everything between   after the parent of first SHA-1 of working branch range  hence the  1   the first commit you want to replay up to  quot integration quot   which points to the last commit you want to replay  from the working branch   to  quot tmp quot   which points to where integration was pointing before  If there is any conflict when one of those commits is replayed   either solve it and run  quot git rebase --continue quot   or skip this patch  and instead run  quot git rebase --skip quot  or cancel the all thing with a  quot git rebase --abort quot   and put back the integration branch on the tmp branch   After that rebase --onto  integration will be back at the last commit of the integration branch  that is  quot tmp quot  branch   all the replayed commits  With cherry-picking or rebase --onto  do not forget it has consequences on subsequent merges  as described here   A pure  quot cherry-pick quot  solution is discussed here  and would involve something like   If you want to use a patch approach then  quot git format-patch git am quot  and  quot git cherry quot  are your options  Currently  git cherry-pick accepts only a single commit  but if you want to pick the range B through D that would be B   D in git lingo  so  git rev-list --reverse --topo-order B   D   while read rev  do    git cherry-pick  rev    break  done   But anyway  when you need to  quot replay quot  a range of commits  the word  quot replay quot  should push you to use the  quot rebase quot  feature of Git

User · Answer

Assume that you have 2 branches    branchA    includes commits you want to copy  from  commitA  to  commitB    branchB    the branch you want the commits to be transferred from  branchA   1     git checkout  lt branchA gt    2  get the IDs of  commitA  and  commitB   3    git checkout  lt branchB gt    4    git cherry-pick  lt commitA gt     lt commitB gt    5  In case you have a conflict  solve it and type   git cherry-pick --continue   to continue the cherry-pick process

User · Answer

git cherry-pick start commit sha id   end commit sha id e g  git cherry-pick 3a7322ac   7d7c123c Assuming you are on branchA where you want to pick commits  start  amp  end commit SHA for the range is given and left commit SHA is older  from branchB  The entire range of commits  both inclusive  will be cherry picked in branchA  The examples given in the official documentation are quite useful

User · Answer

I wrapped VonC s code into a short bash script  git-multi-cherry-pick  for easy running      bin bash  if   -z  1    then     echo  Equivalent to running git-cherry-pick on each of the commits in the range specified        echo         echo  Usage    0 start   end       echo         exit 1  fi  git rev-list --reverse --topo-order  1   while read rev  do    git cherry-pick  rev    break  done    I m currently using this as I rebuild the history of a project that had both 3rd-party code and customizations mixed together in the same svn trunk  I m now splitting apart core 3rd party code  3rd party modules  and customizations onto their own git branches for better understanding of customizations going forward  git-cherry-pick is helpful in this situation since I have two trees in the same repository  but without a shared ancestor

User · Answer

Another option might be to merge with strategy ours to the commit before the range and then a  normal  merge with the last commit of that range  or branch when it is the last one   So suppose only 2345 and 3456 commits of master to be merged into feature branch    master  1234 2345 3456 4567   in feature branch    git merge -s ours 4567 git merge 2345

User · Answer

git cherry-pick FIRST   LAST works only for simple scenarios  To achieve a decent  quot merge it into the integration branch quot  while having the usal comfort with things like auto-skipping of already integrated picks  transplanting diamond-merges  interactive control      better use a rebase  One answer here pointed to that  however the protocol included a dicey git branch -f and a juggling with a temp branch  Here a straight robust method  git rebase -i FIRST LAST 0 --onto integration git rebase   integration  The -i allows for interactive control  The  0 ensures a detached rebase  not moving the   another branch  in case LAST is a branch name  It can be omitted otherwise  The second rebase command just moves the integration branch ref in safe manner forward to the intermediate detached head - it doesn t introduce new commits  To rebase a complex structure with merge diamonds etc  consider --rebase-merges or  --rebase-merges rebase-cousins in the first rebase

User · Answer

All the above options will prompt you to resolve merge conflicts  If you are merging changes committed for a team  it is difficult to get resolved the merge conflicts from developers and proceed  However   git merge  will do the merge in one shot but you can not pass a range of revisions as argument  we have to use  git diff  and  git apply  commands to do the merge range of revs  I have observed that  git apply  will fail if the patch file has diff for too many file  so we have to create a patch per file and then apply  Note that the script will not be able to delete the files that are deleted in source branch  This is a rare case  you can manually delete such files from target branch  The exit status of  git apply  is not zero if it is not able to apply the patch  however if you use -3way option it will fall back to 3 way merge and you don t have to worry about this failure   Below is the script   enter code here         bin bash        This script will merge the diff between two git revisions to checked out branch       Make sure to cd to git source area and checkout the target branch       Make sure that checked out branch is clean run  git reset --hard HEAD        START  1     END  2      echo Start version   START     echo End version   END      mkdir -p   temp     echo  gt   tmp status      get files     git --no-pager  diff  --name-only   START     END   gt    temp files     echo  gt    temp error log       merge every file     for file in  cat    temp files      do       git --no-pager diff --binary   START     END   file  gt    temp git-diff       if      -ne 0         then        Diff usually fail if the file got deleted          echo Skipping the merge  git diff command failed for  file  gt  gt    temp error log         echo Skipping the merge  git diff command failed for  file         echo  STATUS  FAILED  file   gt  gt    tmp status         echo  STATUS  FAILED  file        skip the merge for this file and continue the merge for others         rm -f   temp git-diff         continue       fi        git apply  --ignore-space-change --ignore-whitespace  --3way --allow-binary-replacement   temp git-diff        if      -ne 0          then    apply failed  but it will fall back to 3-way merge  you can ignore this failure          echo  git apply command filed for  file         fi        echo        STATUS  git status -s  file           if       STATUS           then     status is null if the merged diffs are already present in the target file          echo  STATUS NOT MERGED  file           echo  STATUS  NOT MERGED  file     gt  gt    tmp status        else       3 way merge is successful          echo STATUS   STATUS          echo  STATUS   STATUS    gt  gt    tmp status        fi     done      echo GIT merge failed for below listed files      cat   temp error log      echo  Git merge status per file is available in  tmp status

[git] How to cherry pick a range of commits and merge into another branch?

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