A Small Git Mystery
At this point in my career, I am pretty comfortable using git. I will still sanity check myself renaming branches or trying to remove anything from history, but I comfortably manage changes from stash to remote and across branches. As such, it was particularly surprising when my common commands left me in an unexpected state.
$ git status
On branch main
Your branch is up to date with 'origin/main'.
Changes to be committed:
(use "git restore --staged <file>..." to unstage)
modified: my_file
$ git add my_file
$ git commit -m "Updating my_file"
[main hash] Updating my_file
1 file changed, X insertions(+), Y deletions(-)
$ git push
Counting objects: 1, done.
Delta compression using up to 8 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (2/2), done.
Writing objects: 100% (1/1), X bytes | 0 bytes/s, done.
Total 1 (delta 1), reused 0 (delta 0)
remote: Resolving deltas: 100% (1/1), completed with 1 local objects.
To https://wouldntyouliketo.com/know.git
! [remote rejected] main -> main (permission denied)
error: failed to push some refs to 'https://wouldntyouliketo.com/know.git'
Whoops! I thought I was on a branch. Fortunately, I was rejected from pushing directly to main. Fixing…
$ git checkout -b new_branch
Switched to a new branch 'new_branch'
$ git checkout main
Switched to branch 'main'
Your branch is ahead of 'origin/main' by 1 commit.
(use "git push" to publish your local commits)
$ git reset HEAD~1
Unstaged changes after reset:
M my_file
$ git stash
Saved working directory and index state WIP on main: hash Last commit message
$ git stash list
stash@{0}: WIP on main: hash Last commit message
$ git checkout new_branch
Switched to branch 'new_branch'
$ git stash pop
On branch new_branch
nothing to commit, working tree clean
Dropped refs/stash@{0} (hash)
Huh? Nothing to commit? Where are my changes?
$ git status
On branch new_branch
nothing to commit, working tree clean
$ git stash list
$
…What? Where did my changes go? Time to Google change recovery using this dropped stash hash…
Did you see the mistake as it happened? I was scratching my head, but looking back, I find it glaringly obvious. It is not that I learned anything new about how git commands work, but it was certainly an edge case that I typically don’t encounter.
When my push was rejected, I had a commit on my local master. This carried over with git checkout -b new_branch and contained all of the changes that I had reset and stashed. When I then popped these changes, they successfully applied, dropping from the stash and resulting in no change on the branch.
Understand alternative means to achieve your goal in case your tools catch you off guard.
In this case, using the hash of the dropped stash entry to apply my changes to a clean new branch.