How Git Stash Saved My Workflow: Moving Uncommitted Changes

I recently started a new internship and jumped right into setting up the project. After cloning the Next.js repository and installing some packages, I needed to follow our team's organized workflow by switching to a feature branch before committing my changes.

I had uncommitted changes (specifically to my package-lock.json) from the initial setup, and I needed to switch to a development branch to start my actual work while preserving these changes.

When I tried to switch with git checkout dev, Git blocked me to prevent overwriting my local changes. You can see the error in the terminal screenshot below:

The Solution: git stash

I didn't want to lose my changes, but I couldn't commit them yet. I discovered the perfect command for this situation: git stash.

git stash takes your uncommitted changes and temporarily shelves (or "stashes") them, giving you a clean working directory.

Here are the commands I used to fix my workflow, as shown in the image:

1. Stash the uncommitted changes

This command saved my work and cleaned the directory.

git stash

2. Switch to the correct branch

With a clean slate, I was free to switch to the dev branch without any errors.

git checkout dev

3. Retrieve the changes later

After I was done working on the other branch, I switched back to main and used stash pop to bring my saved changes back into my working directory.

# Switch back to the original branch
git checkout main

# Apply the stashed changes and remove them from the stash list
git stash pop

Conclusion

Learning git stash was a great "aha!" moment. It's a simple but powerful command that allows you to pause what you're doing and context-switch without creating messy, half-finished commits. It's now a key part of my daily development workflow.