Git Cherry Pick

git cherry-pick is a powerful command that enables arbitrary Git commits to be picked by reference and appended to the current working HEAD. Cherry picking is the act of picking a commit from a branch and applying it to another. git cherry-pick can be useful for undoing changes. For example, say a commit is accidentally made to the wrong branch. You can switch to the correct branch and cherry-pick the commit to where it should belong.

When to use git cherry pick?

git cherry-pick is a useful tool but not always a best practice. Cherry picking can cause duplicate commits and many scenarios where cherry picking would work, traditional merges are preferred instead. With that said git cherry-pick is a handy tool for a few scenarios...

Command cherry-pick uses HashID of commit as argument.

Team collaboration.

Often times a team will find individual members working in or around the same code. Maybe a new product feature has a backend and frontend component. There may be some shared code between to two product sectors. Maybe the backend developer creates a data structure that the frontend will also need to utilize. The frontend developer could use git cherry-pick to pick the commit in which this hypothetical data structure was created. This pick would enable the frontend developer to continue progress on their side of the project.

Bug hotfixes

When a bug is discovered it is important to deliver a fix to end users as quickly as possible. For an example scenario,say a developer has started work on a new feature. During that new feature development they identify a pre-existing bug. The developer creates an explicit commit patching this bug. This new patch commit can be cherry-picked directly to the main branch to fix the bug before it effects more users.