How to git cherrypick all changes introduced in specific branch

Question

Background info:

Due to restrictions in workflow with out existing systems, we need to set up a somewhat unorthodox git process.

(patch)    A-B---F
             |   |
(hotfix)     C-D-E
                 |
(dev)      1-2-3-G

On the patch branch, there are some commits. The files here are similar but not identical to the ones on dev (sync scripts switch around the order of settings in many of the files, making them appear changed while they are functionally the same).

A fix is needed on this branch so a hotfix branch is created and worked on. This branch is then merged back into patch, so far, so good.

This same fix needs to be deployed to the dev branch so it stays relatively in sync with patch, but trying to merge the hotfix branch leads to git trying to merge all the unrelated and 'unchanged' files from A and B as well, rather than only C,D and E.

Question:

It seems that cherry-pick does what we want in terms of only getting changes from selected commits, but I would really like a way to cherry-pick all commits in a given branch at once, without having to look up the commit ids every time.

Solution 1

It seems that cherry-pick does what we want in terms of only getting changes from selected commits, but I would really like a way to cherry-pick all commits in a given branch at once, without having to look up the commit ids every time.

---

Using cherry-pick

git cherry-pick allows you to pick any commits you made in any branch to any other branch. In your case you can simply checkout master branch and then cherry-pick all the commits from any branch that you wish (cherry-pick supports ranges so you can specify start and end commit instead of listing all the commits).

This way you can control the way your commits will appear in the desired branch.

For example:

git cherry-pick ebe6942..905e279

---

# Find the range of commits you wish to re-add to your branch.
# then use cherry-pick to add them back to the branch
git cherry-pick start..end

# If you wish to include the start commit as well add the ^
# This will result in a cherry-pick of the start commit included as well 
git cherry-pick start^..end

---

How to find first commit of branch?

git log

 # print out the latest commit (first one) of the given branch
 git log  --oneline | tail -1

merge-base

Use the merge-base command to find where the branch was split from the original branch:

git merge-base A B

Solution 2

If you want to cherry-pick all commits from branch dev.

Try:

git cherry-pick ..dev

Solution 3

A one liner would be:

git cherry-pick $(git merge-base master my/branch)..my/branch

You can also convert this into a git alias or bash function. I prefer using it like this so I only change single place:

BRANCH=my/branch; git cherry-pick $(git merge-base master ${BRANCH})..${BRANCH}

Solution 4

Assuming you know the number of commits you wish to pick from the branch you can use the relative commit notation.

git cherry-pick BRANCH_A~10^..BRANCH_A

This will cherry pick all commits starting at 10 commits before (~10) BRANCH_A's HEAD, inclusive of the starting commit (^), and will get all commits in the range (..) through to BRANCH_A's HEAD.

Solution 5

Following from discussion in the accepted answer, here is a one-liner. It should not matter what branch you are currently on when you run this (presumably some non-default branch). This assumes that devel is the default branch, and that you want to cherry pick all commits from branch B, after it diverged from the devel branch.

git cherry-pick $(git log devel..B --pretty=format:"%h" | tail -1)^..$(git log B -n 1 --pretty=format:"%h")

The command syntax goes first..last, but we are using a variant here which is more like first-1^..last.

The command git log devel..B --pretty=format:"%h" | tail -1 gets the commit in the devel branch which is a parent of the first commit in the B branch. This is a little clunky, but the git merge-base command did not have the needed formatting options.

The command git log B -n 1 --pretty=format:"%h" just gets the last commit in that branch.

This will put your in an interactive cherry-pick context. So make sure to abort if it's not going well.

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