Git Stash Guide — Save & Restore Work in Progress

Basic stash workflow

git stash saves your uncommitted changes (staged and unstaged) and reverts the working tree to HEAD. git stash pop restores the most recent stash and removes it from the stash list. This is the most common pattern: stash, switch branches, do work, switch back, pop.

# Git Stash — temporarily save uncommitted changes
git stash                    # stash tracked changes
git stash -u                 # include untracked files
git stash push -m "WIP: auth feature"  # with a description

git stash list               # view all stashes
# stash@{0}: WIP: auth feature
# stash@{1}: WIP on main: abc1234

git stash pop                # apply latest + remove from stash
git stash apply stash@{1}    # apply specific stash (keep it)
git stash drop stash@{0}     # delete a stash
git stash clear              # delete all stashes

Advanced stash usage

Use git stash push -m 'description' to label stashes. git stash --include-untracked saves new untracked files too. git stash apply restores without removing from the list (useful when applying to multiple branches). git stash branch <name> creates a new branch from a stash.