Software Engineering – Ryan Chapin's Website

How to partially cherry-pick a commit in git

Posted on October 12, 2024July 25, 2025 by rchapin

There are times when you need to cherry-pick a commit from another branch. Then there are times when you only need parts of that commit.

Following is how you can partly cherry-pick a commit to get only the changes that you need.

Get the patch for the entire commit. Include the -n for no commit so that it does not add it as a commit to your branch

git cherry-pick -n <commit>

Then unstage the the changes from the cherry-picked commit so that you can choose which lines/hunks that you want to include

git reset

From here you can either git add -p to specify specific files or use git gui or some other tool to selectively stage and commit lines or hunks of the current set of changes.

Then just use git commit to commit your changes and reset the rest that you do not want and you are done.

Earthly Cheat Sheet

Posted on June 5, 2023 by rchapin

I have just recently started using Earthly and the following is a list of commands that I want to keep track of

Caching

Completely clearing the cache: Earthly stores artifacts in docker volumes. If you want to completely flush that data and start fresh run the following

docker stop earthly-buildkitd && \
docker rm earthly-buildkitd && \
docker volume rm earthly-cache

Git Merge Conflict Resolution Cheat Sheet

Posted on March 13, 2023April 28, 2025 by rchapin

Some of git’s nomenclature can be confusing, especially since it is context dependent. Following are some TLDR;s for dealing with resolving merge conflicts in different scenarios.

–ours vs –theirs

The meaning of --ours vs --theirs can depend on whether you are doing a rebase or a merge.

Assuming that the feature branch is checked out

	`git merge develop`	`git rebase develop`
To keep changes from `develop`	`--theirs`	`--ours`
To keep changes from `feature`	`--ours`	`--theirs`

If, during a rebase there is a conflict and you know you want to take ALL of the changes from the branch you are rebasing onto, or ALL of the changes from the feature branch you can do the following (note that --ours vs --theirs follows the same semantics as described in the table above):

# Take all changes from the branch on which you are rebasing
git checkout --ours <path-to-file>

# Or, if you want to take all of the changes from the feature branch
git checkout --theirs <path-to-file>

# Then you can
git add <path-to-file>
git rebase --continue

Current Change vs. Incoming Change When Rebasing

Sometimes you may also see “Incoming” vs. “Current” changes when rebasing a feature branch. Assuming that the feature branch is checked out

	`git rebase develop`
To keep changes from `develop`	Accept Current Change
To keep changes from `feature`	Accept Incoming Change

If,