How do I use git reset --hard HEAD to revert to a previous commit

Question

I know that Git tracks changes I make to my application  and it holds on to them until I commit the changes  but here s where I m hung up   When I want to revert to a previous commit I use    git reset --hard HEAD  And Git returns   HEAD is now at 820f417 micro   How do I then revert the files on my hard drive back to that previous commit   My next steps were   git add   git commit -m  revert    But none of the files have changed on my hard drive     What am I doing right wrong

User · Answer

WARNING  git clean -f will remove untracked files  meaning they re gone for good since they aren t stored in the repository  Make sure you really want to remove all untracked files before doing this      Try this and see git clean -f     git reset --hard will not remove untracked files  where as git-clean will remove any files from the tracked root directory that are not under Git tracking   Alternatively  as  Paul Betts said  you can do this  beware though - that removes all ignored files too    git clean -df git clean -xdf CAUTION  This will also delete ignored files

User · Answer

First  it s always worth noting that git reset --hard is a potentially dangerous command  since it throws away all your uncommitted changes  For safety  you should always check that the output of git status is clean  that is  empty  before using it   Initially you say the following      So I know that Git tracks changes I make to my application  and it holds on to them until I commit the changes  but here s where I m hung up    That s incorrect  Git only records the state of the files when you stage them  with git add  or when you create a commit  Once you ve created a commit which has your project files in a particular state  they re very safe  but until then Git s not really  tracking changes  to your files   for example  even if you do git add to stage a new version of the file  that overwrites the previously staged version of that file in the staging area    In your question you then go on to ask the following      When I want to revert to a previous commit I use  git reset --hard HEAD And git returns  HEAD is now at 820f417 micro      How do I then revert the files on my hard drive back to that previous commit    If you do git reset --hard  lt SOME-COMMIT gt  then Git will    Make your current branch  typically master  back to point at  lt SOME-COMMIT gt   Then make the files in your working tree and the index   staging area   the same as the versions committed in  lt SOME-COMMIT gt     HEAD points to your current branch  or current commit   so all that git reset --hard HEAD will do is to throw away any uncommitted changes you have   So  suppose the good commit that you want to go back to is f414f31   You can find that via git log or any history browser   You then have a few different options depending on exactly what you want to do    Change your current branch to point to the older commit instead  You could do that with git reset --hard f414f31  However  this is rewriting the history of your branch  so you should avoid it if you ve shared this branch with anyone  Also  the commits you did after f414f31 will no longer be in the history of your master branch  Create a new commit that represents exactly the same state of the project as f414f31  but just adds that on to the history  so you don t lose any history  You can do that using the steps suggested in this answer - something like   git reset --hard f414f31 git reset --soft HEAD  1  git commit -m  Reverting to the state of the project at f414f31

[git] How do I use 'git reset --hard HEAD' to revert to a previous commit?

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