Accidentally branched off of the wrong branch, and when I want to merge into the master I have to merge both branches

Question

So I created a branch off of another branch I was already creating, and now when I try to merge the branches into master, I have run into the situation where I have to merge both branches.

Here is a diagram

Master->

  ->Branch 1 -> Branch 2 

I want to be able to merge just the changes on branch 2 onto master without having to merge the changes on Branch 1 if that makes sense. I looked into reset and revert, but it seems like these things will delete all the changes I made with branch 2. Any ideas?

Thanks

Answer 1

Try git rebase --onto with the following syntax:

To put branch2's changes on to the master without including branch1's

git rebase --onto master branch1 branch2

Relevant output from git help rebase :

Here is how you would transplant a topic branch based on one branch to another, to pretend that you forked the topic branch from the latter branch, using rebase --onto .

First let's assume your topic is based on branch next . For example, a feature developed in topic depends on some functionality which is found in next .

  o---o---o---o---o master \\ o---o---o---o---o next \\ o---o---o topic 

We want to make topic forked from branch master ; for example, because the functionality on which topic depends was merged into the more stable master branch. We want our tree to look like this:

  o---o---o---o---o master | \\ | o'--o'--o' topic \\ o---o---o---o---o next 

We can get this using the following command:

 git rebase --onto master next topic 

Keep in mind the risks and pitfalls of rebasing, mentioned here: http://git-scm.com/book/en/Git-Branching-Rebasing

Answer 2

One way to do it is, use cherry-pick . Do a git log branch2 and find the commit id's you want and then switch to master branch using git checkout master then use git cherry-pick <commit_id>

Refer to this post for more details

How to merge a specific commit in Git