JIYIK CN >

This article outlines the process of pushing a specific commit to a remote repository in Git. Suppose we have a Git repository with multiple commits, and we need to push only one commit, how would we go about it?

Push specific commits to the remote repository

To push a single commit to a remote repository, we use the Git push command in the context shown below.

$ git push <remote> <commit id>:<remote branch>

As always, we will use an example to illustrate this concept.

The example below shows a demo repository with four commits, as shown in the following image.

Let's say we want to push our initial commit to a remote repository. How would we go about doing this?

Assuming we are pushing to the remote repository for the first time, we will follow the steps below.

First, we add the remote repository to our local repository as shown below.

$ git remote add origin https://github.com/Wachira11ke/Demo.git

To push our initial commit to the remote, we will run:

$ git push origin 6b0f31a:refs/heads/master

Since we are pushing to the remote for the first time, we need to create a master branch in the remote repository using the refs/heads/master parameter. This command will only push our initial commits to the remote repository.

What if we only want to push the first commit, which is to update the license?

Running git push origin c87321d:masterwill not produce the expected effect.

This is because Git will push all commits up to and including the specified commit. We don't want that, do we?

We need to reschedule the submissions so that the first submission is the last. Our updated license submission should go immediately after the initial submission.

We can do this by running the git rebase command in interactive mode as shown below.

$ git rebase -i HEAD~3

This command will open a text editor. We will use the pick command and rearrange the commits as shown below.

We can now exit our text editor and complete the rebase. Your commit history should not look like this:

We can now push our commits to the remote repository as shown below.

$ git push origin 20136f7:master

Our remote repository should contain only two commits.

1. Initial Submission Submission
2. Update license submission.

Let's confirm our situation.

Together, git push <remote> <commit id>:<remote branch>this allows us to push specific commits to a remote repository.

However, this command will push all commits up to and including the specified commit. To fix this, you will need to use the git rebase command to rearrange your commits as we show.