git-cherry-pick – Apply the changes introduced by some existing commits. Cherry picking in git means to choose a commit from one branch and apply it onto another. This is in contrast with other ways such as merge and rebase which normally applies many commits onto a another branch.
In another word, Cherry picking in Git is designed to apply some commit from one branch into another branch. It can be done if you eg. made a mistake and committed a change into wrong branch, but do not want to merge the whole branch. You can just eg. revert the commit and cherry-pick it on another branch.
Make sure you are on the branch you want apply the commit to.
$ git checkout master
Execute the following:
$ git cherry-pick
#In this case, 62ecb3 is the cherry and you want to pick it!
$ git checkout master
$ git cherry-pick 62ecb3
Cherry picking a range of commits
In some cases picking one single commit is not enough. You need, let’s say three consecutive commits. cherry-pick is not the right tool for this. rebase is. From the previous example, you’d want commit 76cada and 62ecb3 in master. The flow is to first create a new branch from feature at the last commit you want, in this case 62ecb3.
$ git checkout -b newbranch 62ecb3
Next up, you rebase the newbranch commit --onto master. The 76cada^ indicates that you want to start from that specific commit.
$ git rebase --onto master 76cada^
# The result is that commits 76cada through 62ecb3 are applied to master.Code language: PHP (php)
I’m Rajesh Kumar, a DevOps, SRE, DevSecOps, Cloud, and Platform Engineering expert passionate about sharing practical knowledge, real-world experiences, and industry best practices. I have worked at Cotocus and regularly write about technology, travel, investing, health, product reviews, and digital marketing through my various platforms.
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Good exercise on using
git cherry-pickto apply specific commits. One real-world point worth adding is that cherry-pick often creates hidden complexity in long-lived branches—especially when the same fix gets cherry-picked across multiple release branches, leading to duplicate commits and harder merges later. In practice, teams usually prefer backport branches or merge-based workflows unless there’s a strong release isolation need, and they rely on clear commit tagging to avoid tracking confusion during future integrations.