Making a Git push from a detached head

Question

I am on a detached head and made some changes. I want to push up these changed to this detached head with Git. I do not want my changes to go onto the develop branch and certainly not on the master branch. I am working on a file with another individual.

Example branches

   develop
   master
   *(HEAD detached at origin/49792_testMocha)

How do I push into head without affecting develop or master?

Answer 1

Create a new branch using git checkout -b BRANCH_NAME

Then push the new branch to remote: git push origin BRANCH_NAME

Answer 2

If you are on a detached head and you want to push to your remote branch

git push origin HEAD:name-of-your-branch

otherwise you can create a new branch and push to it ( it will be created automatically )

git branch new-branch-name
git push -u origin new-branch-name

Answer 3

While all the answers here sort of answer the original question (how to push from a detached head without affecting other branches) all suggest creating a new branch.

Here's how to push to a new remote branch without creating a new local branch:

git checkout --detach # (or anything else that leaves you with a detached HEAD - guillotine anyone?)
[change stuff & commit]
git push origin HEAD:refs/heads/my-new-branch

Replace origin with the appropriate remote name (that you have write access to), and my-new-branch with whatever you want the new branch to be called.

Your commit(s) on HEAD will be pushed to a new branch named my-new-branch. 🎉

Answer 4

---

git checkout

git checkout <commit_id>
git checkout -b <new branch> <commit_id>
git checkout HEAD~X // x is the number of commits t go back

This will checkout new branch pointing to the desired commit.
This command will checkout to a given commit.
At this point you can create a branch and start to work from this point on.

# Checkout a given commit. 
# Doing so will result in a `detached HEAD` which mean that the `HEAD`
# is not pointing to the latest so you will need to checkout branch
#in order to be able to update the code.
git checkout <commit-id>

# create a new branch forked to the given commit
git checkout -b <branch name>

Answer 5

Note: making a branch before pushing is all the more recommended that git 2.11 or less used to segfault!

This won't be the case with Git 2.12+ (Q1 2017)

See commit b10731f (07 Jan 2017) by Kyle Meyer (kyleam).
^{(Merged by Junio C Hamano -- gitster -- in commit b85f79c, 18 Jan 2017)}

branch_get_push: do not segfault when HEAD is detached

"git <cmd> @{push}" on a detached HEAD used to segfault; it has been corrected to error out with a message.

The error now will be:

HEAD does not point to a branch

With Git 2.12 or more, you can then push your detached HEAD to a remote branch, as shown in Matt's answer.

Answer 6

Create a new branch for that commit and checkout to it: git checkout -b <branch-name> <commit-hash>. Now you can push your changes to the new branch: git push origin <branch-name>

In case you need to clean up your other branch from leftover commits be sure to run git reset --hard <branch-name>.

Here is an article that explains how branching and detached head works.