How to Commit Some Files in a Branch and Make Them Available in Another

This tutorial shows how you can commit specific files in a branch and make the files available in another branch. Take a situation where you have a project, and you create a feature branch to do some light modifications to the code.

You modify and add new files to the feature branch, and you only need to commit the common files between the master and feature branches.

How do you go about it?

Git Commit Some Files in a Branch and Make Them Available in Another

Let’s take a look at an example.

In the image above, our feature branch has modified and newly added files. The modified files are also present in master.

We only want to commit the modified files and make them available in the master branch. Here is how we do it.

We will first add the modified file. Some may add one file at a time, which still works but takes time and energy.

We can run git add -u to only stage the modified files and make a commit.

Since we only need to make the files available in the master branch, we will use the git cherry-pick command instead of merging the branches.

Run the git log --oneline command to get a list of all the commits in your branch. Note the SHA-1 or hash of the latest commit and switch to the master branch.

We can run the git cherry-pick command, as illustrated below.

$ git cherry-pick be8ed67

The above command should apply the changes in the commit to our master branch.

You can run the git push command if you want to update the remote.

In a nutshell, committing specific files and availing them in another branch is possible. The git cherry-pick command allows us to apply changes from a specific commit.

Always remember to stash changes when switching branches.