Copy the exact git tree from one commit to another branch

README.md

Rather that trying to safely synchronize files between branches, including hidden files, avoiding the .git dir, and removing excess files, it is possible to ask git to create a new commit that represents the exact file set of another commit.

This is based on the concept that git commits are just a pointer to a tree object representing the state of all the files in the repository at the moment of the commit. Instead of creating a new commit based on our git workspace, we create a commit based on the tree from another commit.

# find the tree ID of the source commit
git cat-file -p ${source_commit} | grep tree

git checkout ${dest_branch}

git commit-tree -p HEAD -m "${commit_msg}" "${source_tree_id}"

git checkout -B ${dest_branch}