Split commits into two branches

Question

I am on a branch named feature-1. I run git log, which shows me a bunch of commits:

commit <HASH-1>
…
commit <HASH-2>
…
commit <HASH-3>
…
commit <HASH-4>
…

Now I want commit <Hash-3> and older commits to be on feature-1 branch, whereas commit <HASH-2> and newer commits to be on a new branch named feature-2. How can I do that?

Answer 1

Checkout the commit that you want to be under your new branch and then create branch from this point.

git log --oneline ...

commit <HASH-1>
commit <HASH-2>
commit <HASH-3>
commit <HASH-4>


git checkout -b feature-1 <HASH-3> 
git checkout -b feature-2 <HASH-2> 

and so on,

You simply checkout any commit you want (any point in your history) and then you create branch at this point

---

How to create branches?

Branches can be created in several ways:

Create branch from the current commit

• By creating branch ant not checking them out
  git branch < branch_name>

• By creating and switching to a new branch

  git checkout -b <branch_name>
  git checkout -t <branch_name>
  

The default SHA-1 if not specified is the HEAD

Create branch from selected commit

By adding sha-1 to the checkout command you "set" the commit that your branch will be created from.

    git checkout -b <branch_name> <sha-1>
    git checkout -t <branch_name> <sha-1>

Answer 2

This is a great use case for the interactive rebase feature. First run git branch feature-2. This will create a new branch feature-2 on the same commit as your current HEAD (which points to feature-1).

No you just run git rebase -i origin/master. This will open your $EDITOR with something like this:

pick 3182a77e Commit 1
pick 6f717613 Commit 2
pick f30c1e92 Commit 3
pick b1c13f14 Commit 4

Now you just remove the first two lines, so only the commits you want in feature-1 are there anymore. Then just save the file. Now git will recreate the commits so that feature-1 contains the commits you want.

Not you run git checkout feature-2 and then again git rebase -i origin/master. You will again see all 4 commits, this time just keep the ones you want in feature-2. Then again save the file and you're done.