How do I merge a specific commit from one branch into another in Git?

Question

I have BranchA which is 113 commits ahead of BranchB .

But I only want the last 10 or so commits from BranchA merged into BranchB .

Is there a way to do this?

Answer 1

The git cherry-pick <commit> command allows you to take a single commit (from whatever branch) and, essentially, rebase it in your working branch.

Chapter 5 of the Pro Git book explains it better than I can , complete with diagrams and such. ( The chapter on Rebasing is also good reading.)

Lastly, there are some good comments on the cherry-picking vs merging vs rebasing in another SO question .

Answer 2

If BranchA has not been pushed to a remote then you can reorder the commits using rebase and then simply merge . It's preferable to use merge over rebase when possible because it doesn't create duplicate commits.

git checkout BranchA
git rebase -i HEAD~113
... reorder the commits so the 10 you want are first ...
git checkout BranchB
git merge [the 10th commit]

Answer 3

SOURCE: https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Distributed-Git-Maintaining-a-Project#Integrating-Contributed-Work

The other way to move introduced work from one branch to another is to cherry-pick it. A cherry-pick in Git is like a rebase for a single commit. It takes the patch that was introduced in a commit and tries to reapply it on the branch you're currently on. This is useful if you have a number of commits on a topic branch and you want to integrate only one of them, or if you only have one commit on a topic branch and you'd prefer to cherry-pick it rather than run rebase. For example, suppose you have a project that looks like this:

If you want to pull commit e43a6 into your master branch, you can run

$ git cherry-pick e43a6
Finished one cherry-pick.
[master]: created a0a41a9: "More friendly message when locking the index fails."
 3 files changed, 17 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)

This pulls the same change introduced in e43a6, but you get a new commit SHA-1 value, because the date applied is different. Now your history looks like this:

Now you can remove your topic branch and drop the commits you didn't want to pull in.