Git commands to save current files in temporary branch without committing to master

Question

Suppose I have a local Git repo and some uncommitted changes. Because the changes might be very messy, I don't want to commit to my branch yet, but I do want to test it on the cloud.

I'm seeking a sequence of git commands that can:

1. Commit the "messy changes" to another branch, such as mymessydev
2. git push origin mymessydev .
3. Switch back to master branch with the same uncommitted changes, as if nothing has ever happened.

Answer 1

Let's say you're on the master branch with the messy changes then,

git stash
git checkout -b messybranch
git stash apply
git add .
git commit -m "commit"
git push origin messybranch
git checkout master // clean master

At this point, you won't loose these changes as they're already pushed on messybranch . In order to get these changes back to master , you could either merge messybranch or cherry-pick the commit on master

git merge messybranch

OR

git cherry-pick #commit

cherry-pick or merge commits your changes but if you'd like them to be staged and not committed, you can do

git reset head~1

Answer 2

I wrote a python script to automate this process. It works even for untracked files!

First install the python binding: pip install gitpython

import sys
from git import Repo
import time


def save(temp_branch, repo_path='.'):
    repo = Repo(repo_path)
    git = repo.git
    work_branch = repo.active_branch.name

    ret = git.stash()
    is_stash = not 'No local changes' in ret
    # delete the temp branch if already exist
    try:
        git.branch('-D', temp_branch)
    except:  # the branch doesn't exist, fine.
        pass
    git.checkout('-b', temp_branch)
    if is_stash:
        git.stash('apply')
    git.add('.')
    try:
        git.commit('-m', 'temporary save ' + time.strftime('%m/%d/%Y %H:%M:%S'))
    except:
        print('no temporary changes to push')
    git.push('-f', 'origin', temp_branch)
    git.checkout(work_branch)
    git.cherry_pick('-n', temp_branch)
    print(git.reset('HEAD'))


save(*sys.argv[1:])