5 commits made to wrong branch and pushed to remote/origin

Question

So I accidentally made 5 commits to branch "A", but I intended to make it to branch "B". I have also pushed all my commits to the remote/origin. I realized that I have made all commits to wrong branch. Is there any way I can transfer all these 5 commits to branch "B" and make my branch "A" as it was 5 commits ago?

Answer 1

Checkout to A. Copy and paste the 5 commit hashes anywhere sequentially.

e.g. 5 (oldest) -> 4 -> 3 -> 2 -> 1 (newest), assume 1 is your top commit of git log command.

$ git checkout A
$ git log
# copy the 5 commit hashes

Checkout to B and take (cherry-pick) 5 commits into B branch.

$ git checkout B

$ git cherry-pick <commit-hash>
# repeat 5 times with new commit hash each time (old to new)

# Or, you can cherry-pick a range of commits by 'git cherry-pick <from-commit>^..<to-commit>', note '^' sign
$ git cherry-pick <commit-5>^..<commit-1>  

Now, Undo (hard reset) the latest 5 commits from A. Note, hard reset will change your A's git history (if there is anyone else pulled A branch already locally then you can use revert instead hard reset). so, force push is needed to push the branch A.

$ git checkout A
$ git branch A.bac           # backup branch 'A' for safety 

$ git reset --hard HEAD~5    # undo last 5 commits from branch A
$ git push -f origin HEAD    # need force push since history is changed

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Note: The basic form of cherry picking a range of commits is:

$ git cherry-pick abc1234..def5678

abc1234 is the oldest commit and def5678 is the newest commit. abc1234 is not included in the commit but def5678 is included. If you want to include abc1234 then start the range from the previous commit of abc1234 by putting a ^ after abc1234 like:

$ git cherry-pick abc1234^..def5678