Have you ever found yourself in the middle of coding a feature, only to receive a notification that production is down? If you’re using Git, you now have a few options: commit your work, stash your work, or discard your work. Each of these options has its own set of problems, depending on the situation. If you commit half-baked code, you may need to come back later and rebase to clean up your commit history. Stashing can also cause problems. What if you need to stash extra code later before switching back to your original feature work? As for me, I tend to throw away my current changes if they’re small, but otherwise, I prefer not to.
Recently, I stumbled upon Git worktree, and it has been an amazing boost to my productivity.
What is Git Worktree?
Git worktree allows us to checkout multiple branches in a Git repository, enabling us to switch between different branches without losing our non-committed work. Git achieves this by creating new, separate directories called “linked worktrees” that are associated with a single “main worktree” (the directory created using git clone or git init).
To checkout a new worktree, we use the git worktree add <path> <branch_name> command. Worktrees are created as new directories, with the add command taking a path argument to specify where to create the new directory, and a branch name argument to specify which Git branch to checkout.
We can create new branches by adding the -b argument, like this: git worktree add -b <branch_name> <path>.
We can view all the worktrees we’ve created using the git worktree list command.
With our different linked worktrees created, we can change code and switch between isolated instances of our codebase. The changes done in one worktree do not affect the other worktrees.
What about if we want to commit and push our changes out to Github? No problem! Git worktree is a way to checkout many branches.
So once we’re done making changes in our worktree we can git add, git commit, and git push origin like if we are working on a different branch.
The changes would show up on Github under the <branch_name> we gave in git worktree add <path> <branch_name>.
When we are done with a worktree we can call git worktree remove <path_to_worktree> to delete it.
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I keep all worktrees in a separate directory ~/.worktree, outside of my general projects directory ~/projects, to reduce clutter and keep “main worktrees” explicit from “linked worktrees”.
I am constantly switching between branches and code, and Git worktree has been a huge help to my workflow!