How to move your most recent Git commit to a new branch

If you’re anything like me you’ll have found yourself writing new code and accidentally committing it to the default branch (usually master or main). This might be alright for your personal repos, but when you’re working in a larger team and collaborating on a project using a branch-based workflow (like GitHub flow), then you need to move that commit to a new branch before you push the code.

One way to do this would be to ‘undo’ the commit: rewind your repository history so it’s as if that commit never happened, but with your local files still modified. However, if you do that, you lose the detailed commit message you spent ten minutes writing (you did write a good commit message, didn’t you?). No, what you want to do is create a new branch that includes your latest commit, and then remove the commit from your default branch.

So what you’ve done so far is commit your new code to the master branch by accident:

git commit # Oops

To fix that, you should branch off from the tip of master and then move master back one commit:

git switch -C new-branch
git switch master
git reset --soft HEAD^

That last line, git reset --soft HEAD^, will remove the last commit from master and the files you changed will still be modified but staged. (If you have more than one commit to remove, you can use HEAD~3 instead of HEAD^, where 3 is the number of commits you want to remove. You actually have loads of options available.)

Now you’ve cleaned that up, you can unstage the modified files and then push the new branch:

git reset .
git switch new-branch
git push -u origin new-branch

And now no-one’s any the wiser. You have a clean master branch, a new branch with your new code, and you’re free to carry on adding new commits to the branch.

• Git