When you are in “detached HEAD” state, main and HEAD are displayed separately, as an unrelated reference: $ git tree The HEAD points to the branch you are on with an arrow. * abc01e7 (HEAD -> main, origin/main) Add lorem ipsum to readme When it’s on branch, the output looks like this: $ git tree If you use git log -oneline -graph -decorate -all (something I recommend to define as a git tree alias) it will show your HEAD differently. How does it look in the toolsīesides the git status, how can you see this state? You can see it on your Git tree graph If you are not sure what those terms mean, then stick to creating a new branch, because it will allow you to do the same things, but in a less confusing setup. Switch to a branch and merge your commitsĪlternatively, you can pick an existing branch and either merge your dangling commits or cherry-pick them. Those commands create a new branch, and set it as your current branch.Īlternatively, you can just create a new branch on you current commit and stay in the detached HEAD state: git branch Or the command form Git versions older then 2.23: git checkout -b You can create the branch with the following syntax: git switch -c You can create a new branch, exactly in the point where you are-including all the commits that you maybe created from there. Turn off this advice by setting config variable If you want to create a new branch to retain commits youĬreate, you may do so (now or later) by using -c with the You can look around, makeĬommits you make in this state without impacting any branches

Luckily, you get a bit of instruction directly in the CLI when you check out non-branch reference: $ git checkout abc01e7 while your git rebase stopped halfway-due to conflict or to let you make changes to the commits,.git checkout -tags are similar to branches, but they are meant to be immutable and are not updated as branches.You left the branch and moved your HEAD elsewhere. At some point, the garbage collector will remove them permanently from the repository. So all the commits you a create there are stored but are left dangling: there is no way to easily reach them, and, as such, they are assumed to be unimportant. How does it impact the work?īecause you are not on a branch, Git doesn’t have a branch to update when you create a new commit. In this way, we can pinpoint when exactly the issue was introduced. We noticed something wrong, such as a feature not working as expected, and we check out the last commit that we expect to work OK. A common scenario is to see how the application worked a few commits earlier-for example, for troubleshooting. Why would you switch to commit instead of branch?īecause you can, and it can be sometimes useful. To call your attention to this situation, Git colors HEAD detached to red. Where abc01e7 is an ID of any commit in the repository-it can be inside of any of the branches, on top of one of them, or in another place of the repository history.īecause you are not on a branch anymore, the git status changes to: $ git status Things get complicated when you check out something that is not a branch-for example, when you switch to a commit by its ID: $ git checkout abc01e7 So far, HEAD (current commit) and branch were in a normal, aligned state. Your branch is up to date with 'origin/main'. When you run git status, it tells you what branch you are on: $ git status If you limit yourself to checking branches only, you will never leave this state. Git moves your branch to this new commit.The typical workflow with Git is as follows: Your HEAD is a central piece of the state of your repository. a commit that will be used as a parent when you create a new commit.a reference point when you want to see the last changes to your working copy with git diff.HEAD is a pointer to the current commit-the place where you are in the repository right now.

From Git’s point of view, your main or master branch is no different than lorem-ipsum. is just a convention the teams are using. They literally have no other data than the name and its position. What can be surprising at first is that branches are just labels. On top of this stable base, we have a dynamic part: branches. Git commits gives us a stable, complete history of the changes to the repository. The only way of making changes to the repository is by creating new commits. This is how our repository keeps data safe for us. Git commits are immutable-meaning you can create new ones, but what’s already inside will never be changed. To really understand what is happening, we need to look inside Git. You can look around, makeĮxperimental changes and commit them, and you can discard anyĬommits you make in thisstate without impacting any branches

A common source of confusion when using Git is not knowing what it all means when you see an output like this: You are in 'detached HEAD' state.

Head detached from