git: what to do if you commit to no branch

October 28, 2009 by Ed Spencer · 11 Comments

Using git, you’ll sometimes find that you’re not on any branch. This usually happens when you’re using a submodule inside another project. Sometimes you’ll make some changes to this submodule, commit them and then try to push them up to a remote repository:

ed$ git commit -m "My excellent commit"
[detached HEAD d2bdb98] My excellent commit
 3 files changed, 3 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)
ed$ git push origin master
Everything up-to-date

Er, what? Everything is not up to date – I just made changes! The clue is in the first part of the commit response – [detached HEAD d2bdb98]. This just means that we’ve made a commit without actually being on any branch.

Luckily, this is easy to solve – all we need to do is checkout the branch we should have been on and merge in that commit SHA:

ed$ git checkout master
Previous HEAD position was d2bdb98... My excellent commit
Switched to branch 'master'
ed$ git merge d2bdb98
Updating 88f218b..d2bdb98
Fast forward
 ext-mvc-all-min.js |    2 +-
 ext-mvc-all.js     |    2 +-
 view/FormWindow.js |    2 +-
 3 files changed, 3 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)

Once we got onto the master branch, we just called git merge with the SHA reference for the commit we just made (d2bd98), which applied our commit to the master branch. The output tells us that the commit was applied, and now we can push up to our remote repository as normal:

ed$ git push origin master
Counting objects: 11, done.
Delta compression using up to 2 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (6/6), done.
Writing objects: 100% (6/6), 692 bytes, done.
Total 6 (delta 4), reused 0 (delta 0)
To git@github.com:extmvc/extmvc.git
   88f218b..d2bdb98  master -> master

This had me puzzled for a while so hopefully it’ll save someone banging their head against a nearby wall.

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About Ed Spencer
Software Architect at Sencha Inc where I lead the development of Ext JS and supporting projects. A longtime lover of JavaScript and related geekery, currently living in Palo Alto.

Comments

11 Responses to “git: what to do if you commit to no branch”

David says:

March 4, 2010 at 9:00 am

Thanks man, you saved me. I keep getting into trouble working with so many foreign submodules – I always forget that I shouldn’t work on their code because I end up with changes on “no branch”.
Gergely says:

August 29, 2010 at 6:37 pm

This saved my life just now, thanks
I don’t think I did it with a submodule, though (I don’t even know what that is). I believe it was an uncautious tag creation with EGit then a tag deletion from the command line, and I don’t recall switching back to master… but I started coding anyway x)
Sean says:

June 29, 2011 at 5:04 pm

Thank you. Great explanation.
Barry Rountree says:

June 30, 2011 at 12:03 am

Thanks for posting this. The “no branch” can also show up if you’ve checked out a specific commit without creating a branch.
Chris says:

June 30, 2011 at 12:57 pm

Thanks man! You saved my day
Michel Carroll says:

July 27, 2011 at 1:16 pm

Thanks Spence. You did indeed keep me from banging my head against the wall.
Daniel says:

August 19, 2011 at 7:33 am

Thanks Spence. You did indeed keep me from banging my head against the wall. (2)
Hopefully I won’t lost commits anymore.
Denis says:

October 16, 2011 at 3:15 pm

I really love you (and I am not gay). Thank you !!!
Adam says:

November 28, 2011 at 2:04 pm

Thanks Ed. I’m not sure how I ended up committing to an empty branch but I’m glad that I found your blog post.
Tom says:

December 9, 2011 at 12:12 pm

Thanks for saving me again and again. I already bookmarked your blog post, because I constantly forget to checkout the correct branch before commiting…
raultm says:

January 27, 2012 at 4:41 am

As I can see with all the comments you have saved a lot of re-work.

Thanks!