git: Switch branch and ignore any changes without committing

Question

I was working on a git branch and was ready to commit my changes, so I made a commit with a useful commit message. I then absentmindedly made minor changes to the code that are not worth keeping. I now want to change branches, but git gives me,

error: You have local changes to "X"; cannot switch branches.

I thought that I could change branches without committing. If so, how can I set this up? If not, how do I get out of this problem? I want to ignore the minor changes without committing and just change branches.

Answer 1

You need a clean state to change branches. The branch checkout will only be allowed if it does not affect the 'dirty files' (as Charles Bailey remarks in the comments).

Otherwise, you should either:

• stash your current change or
• reset --hard HEAD (if you do not mind losing those minor changes) or
• checkout -f (When switching branches, proceed even if the index or the working tree differs from HEAD. This is used to throw away local changes. )

Answer 2

If you want to discard the changes,

git checkout -- <file>
git checkout branch

If you want to keep the changes,

git stash save
git checkout branch
git stash pop

Answer 3

well, it should be

git stash save
git checkout branch
// do something
git checkout oldbranch
git stash pop

Answer 4

Follow,

$: git checkout -f

$: git checkout next_branch

Answer 5

Note that if you've merged remote branches or have local commits and want to go back to the remote HEAD you must do:

git reset --hard origin/HEAD

HEAD alone will only refer to the local commit/merge -- several times I have forgotten that when resetting and end up with "your repository is X commits ahead.." when I fully intended to nuke ALL changes/commits and return to the remote branch.

Answer 6

If you have made changes to files that Git also needs to change when switching branches, it won't let you. To discard working changes, use:

git reset --hard HEAD

Then, you will be able to switch branches.

Answer 7

None of these answers helped me because I still had untracked files even after reset and stash. I had to do:

git reset --hard HEAD
git clean -d -f

Answer 8

switching to a new branch losing changes:

git checkout -b YOUR_NEW_BRANCH_NAME --force

switching to an existing branch losing changes:

git checkout YOUR_BRANCH --force

Answer 9

Close terminal, delete the folder where your project is, then clone again your project and voilá.

Answer 10

If you want to keep the changes and change the branch in a single line command

git stash && git checkout <branch_name> && git stash pop

Answer 11

Move uncommited changes to a new branch

I created a .gitconfig alias for this:

[alias]
spcosp = !"git stash push && git checkout \"$@\" && git stash pop --index #"

To change to new-branch-name, use:

git spcosp new-branch-name

And any non-commited file and index changes will be kept.

Answer 12

Easy Answer:

is to force checkout a branch

git checkout -f <branch_name>

Force checking out a branch is telling git to drop all changes you've made in the current branch, and checkout out the desired one.

or in case you're checking out a commit

git checkout -f <commit-hash>

"thought that I could change branches without committing. If so, how can I set this up? If not, how do I get out of this problem?"

The answer to that is No, that's literally the philosophy of Git that you keep track of all changes, and that each node (i.e. commit) has to be up-to-date with the latest changes you've made, unless you've made a new commit of course.

You decided to keep changes?

Then stash them using

git stash

and then to unstash your changes in the desired branch, use

git stash apply

which will apply you changes but keep them in the stash queue too. If you don't want to keep them in the stash stack, then pop them using

git stash pop

That's the equivalent of apply and then drop