Shelving Changes

Sometimes you will want to temporarily remove changes from your working tree and restore them later, For instance to commit a small bug-fix you found while working on something. Bazaar allows you to put changes on a shelf to achieve this. When you want to restore the changes later you can use unshelve to apply them to your working tree again.

For example, consider a working tree with one or more changes made ...

$ bzr diff
=== modified file 'description.txt'
--- description.txt
+++ description.txt
@@ -2,7 +2,7 @@
 ===============

 These plugins
-by Michael Ellerman
+written by Michael Ellerman
 provide a very
 fine-grained 'undo'
 facility
@@ -11,6 +11,6 @@
 This allows you to
 undo some of
 your changes,
-commit, and get
+perform a commit, and get
 back to where you
 were before.

The shelve command interactively asks which changes you want to retain in the working tree:

$ bzr shelve
--- description.txt
+++ description.txt
@@ -2,7 +2,7 @@
 ===============

 These plugins
-by Michael Ellerman
+written by Michael Ellerman
 provide a very
 fine-grained 'undo'
 facility

Shelve? [yNfrq?]: y
--- description.txt
+++ description.txt
@@ -11,6 +11,6 @@
 This allows you to
 undo some of
 your changes,
-commit, and get
+perform a commit, and get
 back to where you
 were before.

Shelve? [yNfrq?]: n
Shelve 2 change(s)? [yNfrq?]', 'y'
Selected changes:
 M  description.txt
Changes shelved with id "1".

If there are lots of changes in the working tree, you can provide the shelve command with a list of files and you will only be asked about changes in those files. After shelving changes, it’s a good idea to use diff to confirm the tree has just the changes you expect:

$ bzr diff
=== modified file 'description.txt'
--- description.txt
+++ description.txt
@@ -2,7 +2,7 @@
 ===============

 These plugins
-by Michael Ellerman
+written by Michael Ellerman
 provide a very
 fine-grained 'undo'
 facility

Great - you’re ready to commit:

$ bzr commit -m "improve first sentence"

At some later time, you can bring the shelved changes back into the working tree using unshelve:

$ bzr unshelve
Unshelving changes with id "1".
 M  description.txt
All changes applied successfully.

If you want to, you can put multiple items on the shelf. Normally each time you run unshelve the most recently shelved changes will be reinstated. However, you can also unshelve changes in a different order by explicitly specifying which changes to unshelve.

Bazaar merges the changes in to your working tree, so they will apply even if you have edited the files since you shelved them, though they may conflict, in which case you will have to resolve the conflicts in the same way you do after a conflicted merge.