How to checkout in Git by date

Question

I am working on a regression in the source code   I d like to tell Git   checkout the source based on a parameterized date time   Is this possible     I also have staged changes in my current view that I don t want to lose   Ideally  I would like to toggle back and forth between the current source  and some version I m interested in based on a previous date

User · Answer

If you want to be able to return to the precise version of the repository at the time you do a build it is best to tag the commit from which you make the build.

The other answers provide techniques to return the repository to the most recent commit in a branch as of a certain time-- but they might not always suffice. For example, if you build from a branch, and later delete the branch, or build from a branch that is later rebased, the commit you built from can become "unreachable" in git from any current branch. Unreachable objects in git may eventually be removed when the repository is compacted.

Putting a tag on the commit means it never becomes unreachable, no matter what you do with branches afterwards (barring removing the tag).

User · Answer

You only need a little change if you hit the limit of reflog  the date you cloned the repo or 90 days a go of history it seems from other notes  git checkout  git rev-list -1 --before  quot Jan 17 2020 quot  HEAD   And you can also use git checkout  git rev-list -1 --before  quot Jan 17 2020 8 06 UTC-8 quot  HEAD   it will checkout the previous commit related to the date or the date-time you enter  see that you can use modifiers for the date  I guess if you dont use UTC -N it just uses UTC time   See that I only changed master to HEAD  it seems to work even if you dont have reflog to the date you want to check

User · Answer

Going further with the rev-list option  if you want to find the most recent merge commit from your master branch into your production branch  as a purely hypothetical example    git checkout  git rev-list -n 1 --merges --first-parent --before  2012-01-01  production    I needed to find the code that was on the production servers as of a given date  This found it for me

User · Answer

Andy s solution does not work for me  Here I found another way   git checkout  git rev-list -n 1 --before  2009-07-27 13 37  master    Git  checkout by date

User · Answer

To those who prefer a pipe to command substitution  git rev-list -n1 --before 2013-7-4 master   xargs git checkout

User · Answer

The git rev-parse solution proposed by  Andy works fine if the date you re interested is the commit s date   If however you want to checkout based on the author s date  rev-parse won t work  because it doesn t offer an option to use that date for selecting the commits   Instead  you can use the following   git checkout      git log --reverse --author-date-order --pretty format   ai  H  master     awk   hash    4   1  gt    2016-04-12   print hash  exit 0        If you also want to specify the time use  1  gt    2016-04-12   amp  amp   2  gt    11 37  in the awk predicate

User · Answer

To keep your current changes  You can keep your work stashed away  without commiting it  with git stash  You would than use git stash pop to get it back  Or you can  as carleeto said  git commit it to a separate branch   Checkout by date using rev-parse  You can checkout a commit by a specific date using rev-parse like this   git checkout  master  1979-02-26 18 30 00     More details on the available options can be found in the git-rev-parse   As noted in the comments this method uses the reflog to find the commit in your history  By default these entries expire after 90 days  Although the syntax for using the reflog is less verbose you can only go back 90 days   Checkout out by date using rev-list  The other option  which doesn t use the reflog  is to use rev-list to get the commit at a particular point in time with   git checkout  git rev-list -n 1 --first-parent --before  2009-07-27 13 37  master    Note the --first-parent if you want only your history and not versions brought in by a merge  That s what you usually want

User · Answer

Looks like you need something along the lines of this  Git checkout based on date  In other words  you use rev-list to find the commit and then use checkout to actually get it   If you don t want to lose your staged changes  the easiest thing would be to create a new branch and commit them to that branch  You can always switch back and forth between branches   Edit  The link is down  so here s the command   git checkout  git rev-list -n 1 --before  2009-07-27 13 37  master

User · Answer

In my case the -n 1 option doesn t work  On Windows I ve found that the following sequence of commands works fine   git rev-list -1 --before  2012-01-15 12 00  master   This returns the appropriate commit s SHA for the given date  and then   git checkout SHA

User · Answer

git rev-list -n 1 --before  2009-07-27 13 37  origin master   take the printed string  for instance XXXX  and do   git checkout XXXX

[git] How to checkout in Git by date?

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