Git Stash vs Git Commit

Understanding Git Stash vs Git Commit

Context: You’re on a feature branch and you want to switch to another branch, but there could be conflicts between a file that was edited on a current branch and the destination branch you’re switching into.

This only happens because git tries to preserve your unstashed/unstaged changes across branches.

Your choices are to commit or stash.

In the future, you can run:

git restore name-of-conflicting-fie

and if its a file that should be tracked, you can run:

git commit (but no need to run git push)

OR

git stash to save the changes on name-of-conflicting-fie for future retrieval. When you need to apply the changes, you can run:

git stash apply

Background:

git commit adds a commit to your local environment. Local is just for you - no one else can see that you’ve added a commit. They can only see that you’ve added a commit once you push the commit to a repo, which is what happened when you ran: git push origin branch.

git push takes your local commit and adds the new commit to the remote repo referenced by origin and the branch specified in branch.