Stashing Changes in Git Without Losing Them

You are halfway through a change when something more urgent lands: a failing deploy, a review to run, a bug on main. Committing half-work pollutes history; stashing shelves it exactly as it is.

Shelve and return#

git stash            # shelve tracked changes, clean working tree
git stash pop        # bring the latest stash back and drop it from the list

Two additions cover most real cases. Untracked files are left behind by default, and a new factory or migration is usually untracked:

git stash -u

And a message, because “WIP on main” tells you nothing next week:

git stash push -u -m "invoice pdf: half the template"

The pile#

git stash list
git stash show -p stash@{1}
git stash apply stash@{1}

pop applies and drops; apply applies and keeps. Reach for apply when the same shelved work might go on more than one branch, or whenever you are not sure - a stash you keep costs nothing, a stash you dropped and needed is gone.

Stash part of the mess#

Sometimes half the working tree belongs to the urgent thing and half to your paused work. Pathspecs split them:

git stash push -m "just the config tweak" config/queue.php .env.example

Only those paths are shelved; the rest of the mess stays where it was.

When the stash grew into real work#

A shelved experiment that turned out to be the fix does not belong on top of whatever your working tree has become. Give it its own branch:

git stash branch fix/invoice-pdf stash@{0}

That creates the branch from the commit you stashed on, applies the stash there, and drops it.

The honest warnings#

• Stashes are local. They are never pushed, so they are not a backup and your self-hosted remote never sees them. Anything you would miss should be a commit on a branch.
• pop can conflict if the tree moved on. It works like a merge: resolve, and the stash stays in the list if the pop fails.
• Stashes fossilize. If git stash list shows entries from last month, they are todos in disguise - apply them to a branch or drop them.

If the context switch is a review rather than an emergency, a worktree beats a stash entirely: the working tree stays untouched and the PR runs next door. But for the five-minute interruption, stash is the right size of tool.