How to create a new branch that has only my changes from develop but doesn't reflect any of my commits on my current branch

Question

Due to how we have automagically handled deploying through our many kubernetees clusters when I'm doing development I'm doing it on my personal branch instead of a branch named after the bug (it's easier to automate deploying and view it on a branch I regularly maintain). I also find myself occasionally doing pointless commits not because I think the code is in a good state but because I need to trigger a new automated deploy.

The net result is I end up with a personal branch with good working code, but with a bunch of ugly/pointless commits cluttering up it's history. I'm wondering if there is a cleaner way to move from my personal branch to the bug branch I'll do the merge request on? I want to transfer all my code changes, but not any of the commit history since I last split off from develop.

Is there a quick/clean way to do this?

Answer 1

You can merge all your changes in a branch as a single commit into another one:

git checkout bugbranch
git merge --squash mybranch
git commit

If you need more control over the commit history, refer to: How do I squash my last N commits together?

Answer 2

Assuming you want to leave the history on branch personal, but copy all the changes over to branch bug as a single commit.

git switch bug
git cherry-pick -n ..personal
git commit

That cherry-pick command takes all the changes on personal that aren't on bug and applies them to bug without (due to -n) committing. Then you can commit them all as a single commit with a new message.

If personal wasn't branched off bug, then you might want to modify the cherry-pick to better control which changes it picks. This takes all changes made on personal since it branched from develop:

git cherry-pick -n develop..personal