moving committed (but not pushed) changes to a new branch after pull

I've done a fair bit of work ("Your branch is ahead of 'origin/master' by 37 commits.") which really should have gone into its own branch rather than into master. These commits only exist on my local machine and have not been pushed to origin, but the situation is complicated somewhat in that other devs have been pushing to origin/master and I've pulled those changes.

How do I retroactively move my 37 local commits onto a new branch? Based on the docs, it appears that git rebase --onto my-new-branch master or ...origin/master should do this, but both just give me the error "fatal: Needed a single revision". man git-rebase says nothing about providing a revision to rebase and its examples do not do so, so I have no idea how to resolve this error.

(Note that this is not a duplicate of https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1394797/git-how-to-move-existing-work-to-new-branch or https://stackoverflow.com/questions/556923/git-how-to-merge-my-local-working-changes-into-another-branch as those questions deal with uncommitted changes in the local working tree, not changes which have been committed locally.)

This should be fine, since you haven't pushed your commits anywhere else yet, and you're free to rewrite the history of your branch after origin/master. First I would run a git fetch origin to make sure that origin/master is up to date. Assuming that you're currently on master, you should be able to do:

git rebase origin/master

... which will replay all of your commits that aren't in origin/master onto origin/master. The default action of rebase is to ignore merge commits (e.g. those that your git pulls probably introduced) and it'll just try to apply the patch introduced by each of your commits onto origin/master. (You may have to resolve some conflicts along the way.) Then you can create your new branch based on the result:

git branch new-work

... and then reset your master back to origin/master:

# Use with care - make sure "git status" is clean and you're still on master:
git reset --hard origin/master

When doing this kind of manipulating branches with git branch, git reset, etc. I find it useful to frequently look at the commit graph with gitk --all or a similar tool, just to check that I understand where all the different refs are pointing.

Alternatively, you could have just created a topic branch based on where your master is at in the first place (git branch new-work-including-merges) and then reset master as above. However, since your topic branch will include merges from origin/master and you've not pushed your changes yet, I'd suggest doing a rebase so that the history is tidier. (Also, when you eventually merge your topic branch back to master, the changes will be more obvious.)

If you have a low # of commits and you don't care if these are combined into one mega-commit, this works well and isn't as scary as doing git rebase:

unstage the files (replace 1 with # of commits)

git reset --soft HEAD~1

create a new branch

git checkout -b NewBranchName

add the changes

git add -A

make a commit

git commit -m "Whatever"

I stuck with the same issue. I have found easiest solution which I like to share.

1. Create new branch with your changes.

   git checkout -b mybranch

2. (Optional) Push new branch code on remote server.

   git push origin mybranch

3. Checkout back to master branch.

   git checkout master

4. Reset master branch code with remote server and remove local commit.

   git reset --hard origin/master

One more way assume branch1 - is branch with committed changes branch2 - is desirable branch

git fetch && git checkout branch1
git log

select commit ids that you need to move

git fetch && git checkout branch2
git cherry-pick commit_id_first..commit_id_last
git push

Now revert unpushed commits from initial branch

git fetch && git checkout branch1
git reset --soft HEAD~1

Alternatively, right after you commit to the wrong branch, perform these steps:

1. git log
2. git diff {previous to last commit} {latest commit} > your_changes.patch
3. git reset --hard origin/{your current branch}
4. git checkout -b {new branch}
5. git apply your_changes.patch

I can imagine that there is a simpler approach for steps one and two.

What about:

1. Branch from the current HEAD.
2. Make sure you are on master, not your new branch.
3. git reset back to the last commit before you started making changes.
4. git pull to re-pull just the remote changes you threw away with the reset.

Or will that explode when you try to re-merge the branch?

Here is a much simpler way:

1. Create a new branch

2. On your new branch do a git merge master- this will merge your committed (not pushed) changes to your new branch

3. Delete you local master branch git branch -D master Use -D instead of -d because you want to force delete the branch.

4. Just do a git fetch on your master branch and do a git pull on your master branch to ensure you have your teams latest code.

A simpler approach, which I have been using (assuming you want to move 4 commits):

git format-patch HEAD~4

(Look in the directory from which you executed the last command for the 4 .patch files)

git reset HEAD~4 --hard

git checkout -b tmp/my-new-branch

Then:

git apply /path/to/patch.patch

In whatever order you wanted.

1. Checkout fresh copy of you sources

   git clone ........

2. Make branch from desired position

   git checkout {position} git checkout -b {branch-name}

3. Add remote repository

   git remote add shared ../{original sources location}.git

4. Get remote sources

   git fetch shared

5. Checkout desired branch

   git checkout {branch-name}

6. Merge sources

   git merge shared/{original branch from shared repository}

For me this was the best way:

1. Check for changes and merge conflicts git fetch
2. Create a new branch git branch my-changes and push to remote
3. Change upstream to new created branch git master -u upstream-branch remotes/origin/my-changes
4. Push your commits to the new upstream branch.
5. Switch back to previous upstream git branch master --set-upstream-to remotes/origin/master