git: push a single commit

Question

Say I made several commits and wish to cherry pick which ones I push to the remote repository. How can I do that (in ascii: C1->C2->C3->C4 and I want to push C2 and C4). Will reordering with rebase, resetting, pushing and then resetting work? (C1->C2->C3->C4 => C2->C4->C1->C3 => reset C4 => push => reset C3). Is there a nicer way?

Answer 1

You may be looking for:

git push origin $commit:$branch

Credit: http://blog.dennisrobinson.name/push-only-one-commit-with-git/

Explanatory notes:

• Pushing a commit pushes all commits before it (as Amber said). The key is to reorder your commits first (git rebase -i), so they are in the order you want to push them.
• $commit doesn't have to be a sha1. For example, "HEAD~N" would push everything before the last N commits.
• $branch (typically "master" or "main") is the branch you push to – the remote branch. It does not have to be the same as a local branch.
• The suggested branch + cherry-pick method (suggested by midtiby) works too, but for reordering purposes (such as getting the prework in first), this avoids creating throwaway branches.

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If the branch does not exist remotely, and you want to create it, it must be prefixed with refs/heads/ (to disambiguate branch from tag):

git push origin $commit:refs/heads/$new_branch

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Pro tip: git-revise is a similar but better tool than git rebase (for local commits specifically). For my purposes, as a daily git user, I think it should be obligatory if you use git revise -i a lot (which is of course quite necessary to produce high quality commits).