[git] How to remove commits from a pull request

I did a pull request but after that I made some commits to the project locally which ended polluting my pull request, I tried to remove it but without any luck.

I found some similar questions on StackOverflow but I can't apply what's in there. It's my first pull request on GitHub so it's kinda strange to me how all of this works.

The highlighted commit is the one I need to keep and remove all the other stuff. It becomes the fourth commit in the history because I make some merge stuff.

my git log

Can someone please explain what's going on and how to fix this problem?

This is what helped me:

1. Create a new branch with the existing one. Let's call the existing one branch_old and new as branch_new.

2. Reset branch_new to a stable state, when you did not have any problem commit at all. For example, to put it at your local master's level do the following:

   git reset —hard master git push —force origin

3. cherry-pick the commits from branch_old into branch_new

4. git push

If you're removing a commit and don't want to keep its changes @ferit has a good solution.

If you want to add that commit to the current branch, but doesn't make sense to be part of the current pr, you can do the following instead:

1. use git rebase -i HEAD~n
2. Swap the commit you want to remove to the bottom (most recent) position
3. Save and exit
4. use git reset HEAD^ --soft to uncommit the changes and get them back in a staged state.
5. use git push --force to update the remote branch without your removed commit.

Now you'll have removed the commit from your remote, but will still have the changes locally.

People wouldn't like to see a wrong commit and a revert commit to undo changes of the wrong commit. This pollutes commit history.

Here is a simple way for removing the wrong commit instead of undoing changes with a revert commit.

1. git checkout my-pull-request-branch

2. git rebase -i HEAD~n // where n is the number of last commits you want to include in interactive rebase.

3. Replace pick with drop for commits you want to discard.
4. Save and exit.
5. git push --force

So do the following ,

Lets say your branch name is my_branch and this has the extra commits.

1. git checkout -b my_branch_with_extra_commits (Keeping this branch saved under a different name)
2. gitk (Opens git console)
3. Look for the commit you want to keep. Copy the SHA of that commit to a notepad.
4. git checkout my_branch
5. gitk (This will open the git console )
6. Right click on the commit you want to revert to (State before your changes) and click on "reset branch to here"
7. Do a git pull --rebase origin branch_name_to _merge_to
8. git cherry-pick <SHA you copied in step 3. >

Now look at the local branch commit history and make sure everything looks good.