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This article will discuss merging specific changes from one branch to another. As we know, when merging branches, Git merges all files without exception.

You may find yourself in a scenario where you have some commits in one branch and you have to pick some and merge them into another branch. Let's see how to solve this problem.

Selectively merge changes from different branches in Git

To understand better, we will simulate a scenario where we need to merge some commits from one branch to another. This is how we will solve it.

example:

In our local repository Delftscopetech, we have two branches, namely:

To keep things as realistic as possible, let's assume that we found some bugs in our project that we need to fix. After fixing the bug, we realize that we checked out on the Dev_Branch branch instead of the Main branch.

A normal merge would break our project. What do we do?

In this case, we will first run the git log command to display our commit history in Dev_Branch . Make sure you are in the branch that contains the changes you want.

$ git checkout Dev_Branch

Here is our commit history:

$ git log --oneline

We will then identify the commits we want to merge into our main branch. Here is the commit history in our Main branch:

$ git checkout Main
$ git log --oneline

We can see that our Main branch does not have the following commits:

1. edcb8ae Second Bug Fix
2. cefb7bb First Bug Fix

To merge two commits, we will use the git cherry-pick command and provide the commit IDs for both commits. Make sure you have checked out in the branch you want to merge into, in our case it is the Main branch.

$ git checkout Main

We can now run cherry-pick as follows:

$ git cherry-pick edcb8ae cefb7bb

The output is as follows:

If you have no merge conflicts, you should get output similar to the one above. Let’s confirm the merge.

$ git log --oneline

The output shows that Git has created two new commits with different commit IDs but the same description. We can now push the branch to the remote repository by running the git push command as follows:

$ git push origin Main

To summarize, git cherry-pickwe can selectively merge in Git thanks to the git merge command. All you need is the commit ID of the changes you want to merge and make sure you are checked out in the right branch.