Move uncommited changes to a different computer without commiting

Question

I have 2 development machines.

I have made uncommitted changes to the repo in machine A. These uncommitted changes includes both edits & newly created files.

I wish to move these uncommitted changes to machine B. NOTE: I do NOT want to commit these changes to the repo and pull them from machine B, becuase I don't want people to see unfinished code in BitBucket commit logs.

Note that both machine A and B has the latest version of the current repository.

According to this: Using git, how do you move some uncommitted changes from one branch to another branch in a different folder?

I should do this in machine A

$ git diff > patch

Send the patch file to mahcine B and do this:

$ git apply /path/to/patch 

This usually works. But in this case the git apply fails.

When I perform $ git apply --check I get errors similar to the following:

error: database/migrations/example.php: No such file or directory

Why is this happening? How can I fix this?

Answer 1

There is no need to push all branches to BitBucket (or whatever central repository you use). Set computer A as remote in the repo hosted on computer B, use git fetch A to get the branches from A then do whatever you want with the fetched commits.

Run once on computer B:

git remote add A <url-of-the-repo-on-A>

Replace <url-of-the-repo-on-A> with an URL you can use on B to access the repo located on the A computer.
For example, assuming on A the repo is located in /home/user1/projects/repo and you can access A from B using ssh as user1 you can use ssh://B/home/user1/projects/repo. (You need to configure A and B to use public keys for authentication to not be bugged by Git about your password on A every time it needs to access the remote repository).

If you have a different way of communication between A and B (f.e. a directory shared by A that is mounted on B) you can use it as well (assuming the repo on B is visible this way).

After the initial set up step, every time you want to transfer the changes from A to B you can create a new commit on A (on whatever branch you want, maybe you want to create a branch special for this transfer). Then you login on B and run (in the repo):

git fetch A

(A is the name of the repository set by the git remote command above).
This brings into the local repo all the commits that are new in A and are not present in the local repo. You can, as well, fetch a single branch by putting it into the command line:

git fetch A branch1

Now, that the changes are in B you can check the branch out and continue working on it:

git checkout branch1

Or move them on top of another branch (using rebase) or merge them or do whatever you want.

Read more about git remote and git fetch.