Stashing local configurations

In the project I’m working on, there are some local configurations (typically database connection strings) that I do not push to the git remote. This causes some inconveniences whenever I am creating or switching branches, as I will need to create and edit the files every time I switch branches. git stash is the solution to deal with this hassle.

Git Stash is a temporary storage on your local computer to store changes in your code which you are not ready to commit yet. Simply enter git stash will shelve all your uncommited tracked files. But in my case, I also created new config files which I don’t git add to track it, so git stash -u will settle my case better. But in order to reuse the same stashed copy every time, it’s easier if I give it a name, so git stash save "local dev" -u will do the trick better. Because you can stash multiple times, it’s easy to forget which is the stash to apply, so in my case, I saved it with the name “local dev”, so that it’s easy to reference.

Then when I switch to a new branch, I will do a git stash list to show all the stashes available, example output below, so that I can identify my saved “local dev” stash.

stash@{0}: WIP on feature/1: xxxx
stash@{1}: WIP on feature/2: yyyy
stash@{2}: local dev

Then I do a git stash apply stash@{2} to apply the changes in my “local dev” stash, without deleting it, and there I go.

FYI:

git stash pop will apply the latest stash, aka stash@{0} and delete the stash.

git stash drop will just delete the latest stash, stash@{0}

git stash drop stash@{1} will delete the particular stash

git stash clear will clear all the stash entries.