Git Stash Workflow

I often find that while I am coding I need to have more than one stream of work going on. One scenario that often occurs is that I am working on a feature and then a bug report comes in that needs to be fixed right away. If the change becomes large, I will create a local branch for the bug fix, but most of the time I just want to save my unfinished feature changes somewhere while I quickly fix the bug.

Git stash allows me to save my current workspace without having to commit unfinished work. The stash command takes all uncommitted changes in the workspace and saves them on a stack so that you can change branches or pull in commits. This is a great way to save a set of changes that you are not quite finished with so that you can switch to working on something else. The changes can be saved with a description so that you can see what you saved later.

Simple git stash workflow that I use most of the time:

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# save changes in the workspace to the stash
git stash save 'some name for what is saved'

# do some work 
# then decide to go back to what is in the stash

# apply the top stash’s changes to the workspace
git stash pop

When I need to know more about what is in the stash:

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# check to see what stashes exist
git stash list

# see what files are changed in the top stash
git stash show

# clear all items from the stash
git stash clear