You sometimes need to grab one commit from another branch and merge it into your local branch, such as a bug fix that needs to be backported. You can grab commits one at a time using git cherry-pick.

Cherry-picking a commit from another takes that single commit and commits it to your local branch. It’s pretty straightforward and appears extremely useful in a lot of situations, but be careful.

Cherry-picked commits have different commit IDs than the original commit they came from because their parent changed—remember that a commit ID is based partially on where it exists in the history, and changing the parent changes the commit ID. A good rule of thumb is to cherry-pick commits only when a merge is not an option, in other words, backporting a bug fix where the backported change is never going to be merged forward.

You must specify the commit that you want to cherry-pick. You can do this with either a commit ID, a branch name, a tag, or some relative reference to any of these. Keep in mind that using a branch name or tag means that the latest commit that those reference is cherry-picked in, not the entire history.

Normally git cherry-pick automatically creates a new commit as soon as it is done. You can change this behavior with two different options. Use --edit (or -e) to launch the editor and change the commit message before committing the cherry-picked revision. This allows you to edit the commit message but not the actual commit.

You can use --no-commit (or -n) to tell Git to stop as soon as the change has been merged and staged. You can use this to cherry-pick several commits and then commit them into your local branch as one commit. Remember to start with the oldest commit first when cherry-picking more than one commit; otherwise, you might end up trying to make a change that isn’t possible or having conflicts because it is in the wrong order.

You can also add a Signed-off-by line to the end of a cherry-picked commit. Signed-off lines consist of the phrase Signed-off-by: followed by your name and email address (pulled from the configuration). This is useful for creating a chain of review for commits and can become essential in backported commits to ensure they have been properly reviewed prior to being merged into an existing branch.

• Merge a single commit from another branch into your local one.

  ​	prompt>​ git cherry-pick some commit ID​

  some commit ID refers to a commit any way you normally can: an actual commit ID, branch name, tag, or some relative version of any of those. For example, to cherry-pick the latest from release_1.0 or commit a74cc83, use this:

  ​	prompt>​ git cherry-pick release_1.0​
  ​	Finished one cherry-pick.
  ​	[master bcdbca8] add <meta> tags
  ​	1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
  ​	prompt>​ git cherry-pick a74cc83​
  ​	Finished one cherry-pick.
  ​	[master dd94f18] working on conerting to Textile
  ​	Author: Andy Lester <[email protected]>
  ​	5 files changed, 195 insertions(+), 176 deletions(-)
  ​	rewrite crank (81%)
  ​	create mode 100644 s/index.textile
  ​	create mode 100644 s/java.textile

• Cherry-pick, but edit the commit message before committing.

  ​	prompt>​ git cherry-pick --edit release_1.0​
  ​	...​ or ...​
  ​	prompt>​ git cherry-pick -e release_1.0​

• Cherry-pick, but don’t commit.

  ​	prompt>​ git cherry-pick --no-commit release_1.0​
  ​	...​ or ...​
  ​	prompt>​ git cherry-pick -n release_1.0​

• Add a “Signed-off-by” line to the commit message.

  ​	prompt>​ git cherry-pick --signoff release_1.0​
  ​	...​ or ...​
  ​	prompt>​ git cherry-pick -s release_1.0​

Related Tasks

• Task 7, ​Committing Changes​

• Task 15, ​Merging Commits Between Branches​