The scenario
Think of an instance someone submits a git pull request to one of your repositories. Now, if you’ve ever been in that position, you know sometimes there are good commits, and bad commits, all inside the same pull request.
In instances as above, one way to move forward is accept the changes in specific commits (good), then have approved and merged.
The tools
We can use the cherry-pick functionality in git when encountered with scenarios as above, which allows us to “cherry pick” only the commits we want from another branch.
Below are the typical steps involved.
- Pull the branch to local. We can use the git hosting platform (GitHub/GitLab/Gitea etc.) UI or the command line.
- Checkout to the branch we are merging into, usually the main branch.
- Find the commits we want to pull, from the git log or the git hosting platform UI, and grab the unique commit hashes for each of the commits we want.
- “Cherry pick” the commits we want to the branch we are merging into with
git cherry-pick long-commit-hash-here, for each commit we want pulled. - Push the changes to remote with
git push remote-name-here branch-name-here.
Cool! now we have merged the commits from the PR selectively.