Git stash

git stash temporarily puts aside changes you’ve made to your working copy so you can work on something else, and then come back and re-apply them later on.

Example

• Stashing your work

The git stash command takes your uncommitted changes (both staged and unstaged), saves them away for later use, and then reverts them from your working copy.

Let’s say we create two files:

echo "File 1" > a.txt
echo "File 2" > b.txt

We can add one file to the stage index, and one commit.

git add a.txt
git commit -m 'add(first file)'
git add b.txt

We see that there is one in the staging index, and one not tracked:

git status

Output:

On branch main
Changes to be committed:
  (use "git restore --staged <file>..." to unstage)
        new file:   b.txt

• Let’s use the git stash command to work on something else:

  git stash
  

  Output:

  Saved working directory and index state WIP on main: f0187ec add(first file)
  

• We can see the output of the git status:

  On branch main
  nothing to commit, working tree clean
  

• At this point, we’re free to make changes, create new commits, switch branches, and perform any other Git operations. Then we can come back and re-apply your stash. Note that the stash is local to your Git repository; stashes are not transferred to the server when you push.

• Re-applying your stashed changes. We can reapply previously stashed changes with git stash pop:

On branch main
Changes to be committed:
  (use "git restore --staged <file>..." to unstage)
        new file:   b.txt

Dropped refs/stash@{0} (69c2ef7c644fe20441d948c30381a2d0c9425c48)

Popping your stash removes the changes from your stash and reapplies them to your working copy.

Note that by default Git won’t stash changes made to untracked or ignored files.