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Learn the hidden feature in Git - Stash

Yuvaraj on May 16, 2021

Hello everyone 👋, In this article, Let's discuss about the stash feature in Git. We are going to cover the following topics: What is Stash? When...

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Lucas Perez • May 16 '21 • Edited

Git stash can sometimes be very useful, specially because we can't switch branches with modified files around.
Another way is to simply type git stash, it will put everything in the stash with a WIP message automatically. Then you can do git stash pop to pop the last added entry to the stash (:

Yuvaraj • May 16 '21

You are correct. But, when we have multiple stash and If one would like to apply the stash which is in the middle, then pop doesn't solve it.

Branislav Totic • May 17 '21

From git version 2.11 you can do git stash pop stash@{n}, or even better
you can just use index instead stash@{n} like git stash pop n.

Lucas Perez • May 16 '21

Or when we want to stash specific files, we can't simply git stash too, as it will stash everything!

Yuvaraj • May 16 '21

Yesss!

Branislav Totic • May 17 '21

Stash is awesome, but you didn't mention one more flag that sometimes you will found useful.
git stash -u

flag -u: will stash untracked files as well

Yuvaraj • May 17 '21

Yes, thanks for adding the missing information 🙂

dyagzy • May 20 '21

So I faced this exact issue today at work and I didn't know how to resolve. Had to call a senior member of the team to help me out. I wished I had read your article before today. I learnt a lot from this article thanks for sharing.

Yuvaraj • May 21 '21

I'm glad that it's useful 🙂

Johann • May 16 '21

Thanks for sharing! I'm happy that I was introduced to stashes early when I learned git.
What did you do instead of stashing before?

Yuvaraj • May 16 '21

Like years before, the contents of the modified file is copied and saved it in another backup folder. Then discard the changes in working copy.

Johann • May 23 '21

Ahaha relatable, guess I did that for everything before I even knew git - like creating a new "version directory" after every big change to have a chance to go back :p

SeongKuk Han • May 21 '21

I didn't know about 'stash' well.
I used 'stash' only when I had to pull same files I'm working on now.
At that time, I just ran four commands 'git add .', 'git stash', 'git pull', 'git stash pop'.
Now, I think I'm able to use the command 'stash' better.
Thank you for sharing.

Yuvaraj • May 22 '21

I'm glad that it's useful :)

Brian Canzanella • May 21 '21

Nice! Another thing you can do with stashes is create branches from them...

git stash branch <branchname> [<stash>]

mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/softwa...

Bhavesh Mishra • May 18 '21

For multiple stash we can do something like git stash list which will give us all the stash allng with no and stash name if given any and we can siplu apply this by git stash apply name / git stash apply stash@{1}

Steven Diamante • May 17 '21

This was informative. I am a serial git stash/popper. Never really dove deeper than that. I've been on teams that lost stashes because of just relying on the stack. Thanks!

Yuvaraj • May 17 '21

I'm glad that you learned something from this article 🙂

Sreekar Guddeti • May 20 '21

Thank you for the tutorial :). However, if I work with a two separate branches for the two features described above, I do not find any reason to use git stash. Am I missing something?

Yuvaraj • May 21 '21

It is okay to create a feature branch and work separately. Assume when you and your teammates working on the same file called abc.js and abc.html to fix a bug. One is handling UI and you will take care functional issue. You are trying to fix the functional issue but there is some dependency on UI fix as well.
You're debugging the issue by putting console.log debugger etc.. at the same time other person fixed the UI issue.

In this case, you have some unfinished code and you cannot push it until it's done. But since your issue has some partial dependency on UI fix, you need to take pull.

In this case, you can move your existing changes to stash, pull the UI fix, apply the stash, and then you can continue your work.

If you see here, you haven't pushed the code due to stash.

This is one example to use stash.

Sreekar Guddeti • May 23 '21

Thank you for the helpful use case. After reading your write up and doing some look-up of git stash --help, I get a feeling that git stash and its extensions are aliases to block commands consisting of primitive git commands (like add , branch , commit, checkout, reset.

Following up the interrupted workflow use-case in the help man-page

git stash push

is an alias for

(main) $ git branch my_wip
(main) $ git checkout my_wip
(my_wip) $ git add .\n
(my_wip) $ git commit -m 'WIP'

where wip stands for Work in Progress, and

git stash pop

is an alias for

(main) $ git checkout my_wip
(my_wip) $ git reset --soft HEAD^
(main) $ git checkout main
(main) $ git branch --delete my_wip

So considering these boilerplate commands one has to type for an interrupted workflow, there definitely is some utility for using git stash push/pop :).

Gnana Sekar Jesuraj • May 17 '21

Good one Yuvaraj. git stash was the life saver whenever I wanted to switch to main branch to fix any prod issues without having to worry about the current feature branch changes.