Can I delete a git commit but keep the changes

Question

In one of my development branches  I made some changes to my codebase  Before I was able to complete the features I was working on  I had to switch my current branch to master to demo some features  But just using a  git checkout master  preserved the changes I also made in my development branch  thus breaking some of the functionality in master  So what I did was commit the changes on my development branch with a commit message  temporary commit  and then checkout master for the demo   Now that I m done with the demo and back to work on my development branch  I would like to remove the  temporary commit  that I made while still preserving the changes I made  Is that possible

User · Answer

I think you are looking for this  git reset --soft HEAD 1  It undoes the most recent commit whilst keeping the changes made in that commit to staging

User · Answer

You re looking for either git reset HEAD  --soft or git reset HEAD  --mixed   There are 3 modes to the reset command as stated in the docs   git reset HEAD  --soft  undo the git commit  Changes still exist in the working tree the project folder    the index  --cached   git reset HEAD  --mixed  undo git commit   git add  Changes still exist in the working tree  git reset HEAD  --hard  Like you never made these changes to the codebase  Changes are gone from the working tree

User · Answer

It s as simple as this    git reset HEAD    Note  some shells treat   as a special character  for example some Windows shells or ZSH with globbing enabled   so you may have to quote  HEAD   in those cases   git reset without a --hard or --soft moves your HEAD to point to the specified commit  without changing any files  HEAD  refers to the  first  parent commit of your current commit  which in your case is the commit before the temporary one   Note that another option is to carry on as normal  and then at the next commit point instead run   git commit --amend  -m     etc    which will instead edit the most recent commit  having the same effect as above   Note that this  as with nearly every git answer  can cause problems if you ve already pushed the bad commit to a place where someone else may have pulled it from  Try to avoid that

User · Answer

Yes  you can delete your commit without deleting the changes  git reset

User · Answer

In some case  I want only to undo the changes on specific files on the first commit to add them to a second commit and have a cleaner git log   In this case  what I do is the following   git checkout HEAD 1  lt path to file to put in different commit gt  git add -u git commit --amend --no-edit git checkout HEAD  1   lt path to file to put in different commit gt  git commit -m  This is the new commit    Of course  this works well even in the middle of a rebase -i with an edit option on the commit to split

User · Answer

2020 Simple way     git reset  lt commit hash gt     The commit hash of the last commit you want to keep    If the commit was pushed  you can then do    git push -f   You will keep the now uncommitted changes locally

User · Answer

There are two ways of handling this  Which is easier depends on your situation  Reset  If the commit you want to get rid of was the last commit  and you have not done any additional work you can simply use git-reset  git reset HEAD    Takes your branch back to the commit just before your current HEAD  However  it doesn t actually change the files in your working tree  As a result  the changes that were in that commit show up as modified - its like an  uncommit  command  In fact  I have an alias to do just that   git config --global alias uncommit  reset HEAD     Then you can just used git uncommit in the future to back up one commit   Squashing  Squashing a commit means combining two or more commits into one  I do this quite often  In your case you have a half done feature commited  and then you would finish it off and commit again with the proper  permanent commit message   git rebase -i  lt ref gt    I say  above because I want to make it clear this could be any number of commits back  Run git log and find the commit you want to get rid of  copy its SHA1 and use it in place of  lt ref gt   Git will take you into interactive rebase mode  It will show all the commits between your current state and whatever you put in place of  lt ref gt   So if  lt ref gt  is 10 commits ago  it will show you all 10 commits   In front of each commit  it will have the word pick  Find the commit you want to get rid of and change it from pick to fixup or squash  Using fixup simply discards that commits message and merges the changes into its immediate predecessor in the list  The squash keyword does the same thing  but allows you to edit the commit message of the newly combined commit   Note that the commits will be re-committed in the order they show up on the list when you exit the editor  So if you made a temporary commit  then did other work on the same branch  and completed the feature in a later commit  then using rebase would allow you to re-sort the commits and squash them   WARNING   Rebasing modifies history - DONT do this to any commits you have already shared with other developers   Stashing  In the future  to avoid this problem consider using git stash to temporarily store uncommitted work   git stash save  some message    This will store your current changes off to the side in your stash list  Above is the most explicit version of the stash command  allowing for a comment to describe what you are stashing  You can also simply run git stash and nothing else  but no message will be stored    You can browse your stash list with     git stash list   This will show you all your stashes  what branches they were done on  and the message and at the beginning of each line  and identifier for that stash which looks like this stash     where   is its position in the array of stashes   To restore a stash  which can be done on any branch  regardless of where the stash was originally created  you simply run     git stash apply stash       Again  there   is the position in the array of stashes  If the stash you want to restore is in the 0 position - that is  if it was the most recent stash  Then you can just run the command without specifying the stash position  git will assume you mean the last one  git stash apply   So  for example  if I find myself working on the wrong branch - I may run the following sequence of commands   git stash git checkout  lt correct branch gt  git stash apply   In your case you moved around branches a bit more  but the same idea still applies   Hope this helps

User · Answer

In my case  I already pushed to the repo  Ouch    You can revert a specific commit while keeping the changes in your local files by doing    git revert -n  lt sha gt    This way I was able to keep the changes which I needed and undid a commit which had already been pushed

User · Answer

Using git 2 9  precisely 2 9 2 windows 1   git reset HEAD  prompts for more  not sure what is expected input here  Please refer below screenshot    Found other solution git reset HEAD  numberOfCommits using which we can choose to select number of local commits you want to reset by keeping your changes intact  Hence  we get an opportunity to throw away all local commits as well as limited number of local commits   Refer below screenshots showing git reset HEAD 1 in action

User · Answer

One more way to do it   Add commit on the top of temporary commit and then do   git rebase -i   To merge two commits into one  command will open text file with explicit instructions  edit it

User · Answer

For those using zsh  you ll have to use the following  git reset --soft HEAD   Explained here  https   github com robbyrussell oh-my-zsh issues 449 In case the URL becomes dead  the important part is   Escape the   in your command You can alternatively can use HEAD  so that you don t have to escape it each time

[git] Can I delete a git commit but keep the changes?

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