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gitintellij-ideagit-branchgit-rebase

How do I bring changes from a branch to another using IntelliJ?

I am pretty new to git. I wanted to create a project and I'm using IntelliJ to clone my repository. Unfortunately, IntelliJ has its own branch being created (called master). Now I want to submit my changes to main, not to master.

Therefore, I was trying the following:

  1. Commit and push my changes to master in order to make sure that my changes won't get lost.

  2. Select main and do "Rebase master onto origin/main".

  3. Select main and do "checkout".

However, after checkout my changes are reset and the folders are empty. Did I forget something. Thanks for your help.

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I explained it above.

Solution

  • Clarifications on default branch name

    IntelliJ has nothing to do with the name master for the default branch when creating a new repository. This is a Git configuration. By default, Git uses the name specified in the global configuration init.defaultBranch. If no name is specified, then master is used. See the section "Your default branch name" of the official documentation for more details.

    You can check your global configurations with:

    #check your global configurations
git config --global --list

    You can change the name for the default branch with:

    git config --global init.defaultBranch main

    Like so, every new repository on your machine will have main as its default branch.

    Solution to your problem

    Getting back to your problem, If I understood your situation correctly, your repository was created with a master branch, and at some point a main branch was created from it. You've now made some changes on master (commit C), and you would like to have those changes on your main branch instead.

    A -- B ---- C     master
      \ 
       D -- E     main

    In that case, you could rebase main on top of master with:

    #selecting the main branch
git checkout main

#relocating the main branch with master's HEAD commit as its base
git rebase master

    producing the following situation:

    A -- B -- C              master
           \ 
            D' -- E'     main

    If you want to perform the same operation via IntelliJ's interface instead of the terminal, you need to select the option Checkout and Rebase onto 'master'.

    Alternative solutions

    1. Cherry-pick the commit from the master branch to the main branch and reset the master branch to its previous commit.
    # select the main branch
git checkout main

# re-writing the HEAD commit of the master branch on top of main
git cherry-pick master

# selecting the master branch
git checkout master

# resetting the master branch to its previous commit
git reset --hard HEAD~
    1. This solution works if the changes on the master branch haven't been committed yet. First, stash the changes from the master branch, then checkout the main branch and apply the stashed changes on it. Finally, commit the changes on the main branch.
    # while the master branch is checked out

# stashing the uncommitted changes (untracked files included)
git stash push -u

# selecting the main branch
git checkout main

# applying the stashed changes to the main branch
git stash pop

# committing the changes on the main branch
git add <file1>, ..., <fileN>
git commit -m "my commit message"

    Renaming a branch

    If in the future you find yourself in the same predicament, where your default branch is called master and you want it to be called main, you can rename a branch with git branch -m.

    git branch -m master main