Keep changes while doing a `git stash`

Question

Is there any way that I can run git stash have it create a stash of my files, but also keep them around so that I can continue editing them.

My motivation for this is that I would like to create a temporary snapshot of some work I'm doing, so that I can go back to it if I muck things up. However, my code is not currently in a state where I want to actually commit it, and if my test works as I expected, I want to throw the old version away without it ever being in my history.

Obviously I can just make a copy the directory my repo is in, and work in one of them, but is there a better way?

Answer 1

There is (as far as I am aware) not a way to do this with git stash with one command, but you can do it with two uses of git stash.

The commands you want to run are:

git stash
git stash apply

The first one takes your local changes and pushes them to the stash, thus removing them from HEAD. The second one takes the changes from the stack, and puts them back in HEAD, but also leaves a copy of them on your stash stack.

Answer 2

I think a better solution in this situation is to create a topic branch.

In Git, branches are very cheap.

If you have work that you want to "stash" away to come back to later do this:

git checkout -b myStashBranch
git add .
git commit -m "savepoint when I foo..."

then, simply switch back to the branch you were currently on:

git checkout -

and continue on with the task at hand...

If you get to a point where you want to simply throw away that "stashed" work that you just saved do:

git branch -D myStashBranch

Answer 3

You have two options:

git stash store -m "WIP on $(git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD): $(git log -1 --format="%h %s")" $(git stash create)

or

git add -A; git stash --keep-index

There pros/cons to both. The first does not mess around with the state of your working directory at all, but is quite verbose (although turning it into an alias will mitigate this). The second one is simpler, but means that all your changes will be staged (this may or may not be desired).

The benefit of these over

git stash
git stash apply

is that the all the files will need to be modified twice. This can cause issues with speed if there are number of files, or if you are using an IDE that might attempt to rebuild after every time a file changes. If this is is not an issue than by all means use it.

It would have been nice of Git to provide

git stash --keep-working-dir

If you are going to do these with any regularity than you should make an alias.