How do I "move" my commits from "no branch" to an actual branch?

Question

I made a mistake, and started making commits "to the last tag", which lands my commits in "no branch". They should have been applied at the head of an already existing branch. I have not pushed my changes yet. I've found a few other question for when commits are in the wrong branch, but now I have no branch, so I don't know how to handle this.

Preferably, I would like to erase my mistake entirely, and "move" my changes to the end of the right branch. If I must leave my mistake in the history, I need to merge them in atleast.

Solution 1

You are currently in a detached HEAD state. To resolve that, all you need to do is create a new branch with git branch <branchname> or git checkout -b <branchname>. That will leave you with a local branch you can play with, and even delete when you're done with it.

Branches in git are just pointers to commits, so if you create a new branch where you are the new branch will point to your current commit, and then you can merge it or whatnot.

Your "mistake" need not be erased, you simply created new commits on top of previous ones. You did not modify history or anything like that.

EDIT: In response to your comment, what you need to do is:

git branch temp
git checkout master # or any other branch
git merge temp
git branch -d temp

Solution 2

You can view all your commits using git reflog

So you can simply got to another branch, and do git cherry-pick <commit-hash> for the required commits.

But I'd prefer the branch way as spatz mentioned.

Solution 3

Note: you have also

• a complete explanation of detached HEAD in "detached HEAD explained"
• a nice illustration of its effect in "Git Is Your Friend not a Foe Vol. 3: Refs and Index", when doing a checkout of a commit instead of a branch.

In both case, doing a tmp branch and merging it back to the actual branch is the solution.

Solution 4

Another solution, which does not involve creating a temp branch, is described here. You just merge with you last commit rather than a temp branch.

$ git checkout master
$ git merge d2bdb98

If you don't know what commit you are on you can find it with git log. I don't know if this solution is different than "cherry-picking" but it had the expected results for me.

Solution 5

I just had a situation where I had a master branch I wanted to commit to, but accidentally committed to a detached HEAD (note, the commit hash is not important here, but just to illustrate the situation):

$ git branch
* (detached from 29d2cfb)
  master

Here was my quick fix:

$ git branch -f master HEAD
$ git checkout master
Switched to branch 'master'
Your branch is ahead of 'origin/master' by 1 commit.
  (use "git push" to publish your local commits)

Piece of cake.

Note that this trick only works if master originally pointed to the same commit you made your mistaken commit on top of. If that's not the case, you'll have to rebase (or cherry-pick, or merge...).

View more solutions

Comments

[Letharion]

If I understand you correctly, that will create a new branch, but I want to apply all the commits to an already existing branch. I've updated my question to make that more clear.

[drrlvn]

@Letharion, then all you need to do after creating a new branch, is to merge it to the branch where you want these changes, and then you can delete the new temp branch.

[CharlesB]

In this case you'll want to rebase on main branch instead of merge

[drrlvn]

@CharlesB, The default behavior of git merge is to fast-forward if possible, which is the same as rebase.

[CharlesB]

@spatz: Sure but I assume that the merge won't be fast-forward in this case, because commits were made starting from an ancient tag.

[Cascabel]

@Letharion: Then after creating the branch, run git rebase master temp to transplant the commits onto master, before checking out master and merging into it. (The merge will be a fast-forward then.)

[Letharion]

I followed the instructions spatz gave, and it worked well. I'm not sure how the rebase suggestion plays in, but I'll refer to that if I happen to do the same again.

[Marcello de Sales]

Just went through this scenario today with a co-worker. He had checked out another branch, but we could see the commit hash in the shell :)

[wangzhengyi]

Thank you, this is very useful.

[jan-glx]

It is different and merging is want you want in this case. If you made more than one commit in detached HEAD state, cherry-picking would only recover the changes of the latest.

[jan-glx]

git reflog lists commits of other (and no) branches too and is more useful in this scenario

[Stefan Monov]

@spatz: The behavior of git branch temp that I know of is to create a branch without switching to it. Does it have a special meaning of "also assign all no-branch-owned commits to this new branch"?

[pabrams]

This doesn't work. git branch master yields "fatal: not a valid object name: 'master'"