Throw away local commits in Git

Question

Due to some bad cherry-picking  my local Git repository is currently five commits ahead of the origin  and not in a good state  I want to get rid of all these commits and start over again   Obviously  deleting my working directory and re-cloning would do it  but downloading everything from GitHub again seems like overkill  and not a good use of my time   Maybe git revert is what I need  but I don t want to end up 10 commits ahead of the origin  or even six   even if it does get the code itself back to the right state  I just want to pretend the last half-hour never happened   Is there a simple command that will do this  It seems like an obvious use case  but I m not finding any examples of it     Note that this question is specifically about commits  not about    untracked files unstaged changes staged  but uncommitted changes

User · Answer

git reset --hard   u   deletes all your local changes on the current branch  including commits  I m surprised no one has posted this yet considering you won t have to look up what commit to revert to or play with branches     That is  reset to the current branch at   upstream    commonly origin  lt branchname gt   but not always

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Simple Solution will be to match local master branch HEAD to origin master branch HEAD  git reset --hard origin master   PS  origin master - is remote pointer to master branch  You can replace master with any branch name

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Use any number of times  to revert back to the last commit without deleting any files that you have recently created  git reset --soft HEAD 1  Then use git reset HEAD  lt name-of-file files  gt   to unstage  or untrack

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I had a situation where I wanted to remove a commit that wasn t pushed  but the commit was before another one  To do so  I ve used the following command  git rebase -i HEAD 2 -  it will rebase the last two commits  And I used  drop  for the commit signature that I wanted to remove

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Before answering let s add some background  explaining what is this HEAD  since some of the options below will result in detached head  First of all what is HEAD   HEAD is simply a reference to the current commit  latest  on the current branch  There can only be a single HEAD at any given time   excluding git worktree   The content of HEAD is stored inside  git HEAD and it contains the 40 bytes SHA-1 of the current commit     detached HEAD  If you are not on the latest commit - meaning that HEAD is pointing to a prior commit in history its called detached HEAD     On the command line  it will look like this- SHA-1 instead of the branch name since the HEAD is not pointing to the tip of the current branch      A few options on how to recover from a detached HEAD     git checkout  git checkout  lt commit id gt  git checkout -b  lt new branch gt   lt commit id gt  git checkout HEAD X    x is the number of commits t go back   This will checkout new branch pointing to the desired commit  This command will checkout to a given commit  At this point  you can create a branch and start to work from this point on     Checkout a given commit     Doing so will result in a  detached HEAD  which mean that the  HEAD    is not pointing to the latest so you will need to checkout branch   in order to be able to update the code  git checkout  lt commit-id gt     create a new branch forked to the given commit git checkout -b  lt branch name gt      git reflog  You can always use the reflog as well  git reflog will display any change which updated the HEAD and checking out the desired reflog entry will set the HEAD back to this commit    Every time the HEAD is modified there will be a new entry in the reflog  git reflog git checkout HEAD         This will get you back to your desired commit      git reset --hard  lt commit id gt    Move  your HEAD back to the desired commit     This will destroy any local modifications    Don t do it if you have uncommitted work you want to keep  git reset --hard 0d1d7fc32    Alternatively  if there s work to keep  git stash git reset --hard 0d1d7fc32 git stash pop   This saves the modifications  then reapplies that patch after resetting    You could get merge conflicts if you ve modified things which were   changed since the commit you reset to     Note   Since Git 2 7  you can also use the git rebase --no-autostash as well      git revert  lt sha-1 gt    Undo  the given commit or commit range  The reset command will  undo  any changes made in the given commit  A new commit with the undo patch will be committed while the original commit will remain in the history as well     add new commit with the undo of the original one    the  lt sha-1 gt  can be any commit s  or commit range git revert  lt sha-1 gt      This schema illustrates which command does what  As you can see there reset  amp  amp  checkout modify the HEAD

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Delete the most recent commit   git reset --hard HEAD 1  Delete the most recent commit  without destroying the work you ve done   git reset --soft HEAD 1

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On your branch attempt   git reset --hard origin  lt branch name gt    Validate the reversal  to the state  with no local commits   using  git log  or  git status  hence

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Simply delete your local master branch and recreate it like so   git branch -D master git checkout origin master -b master

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For local commits which are not being pushed  you can also use git rebase -i to delete or squash a commit

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git reset --hard  lt SHA-Code gt    This will come in handy if you have made some mistakes on your local copy that you want to make sure doesn t get pushed to your remote branch by mistake    The SHA-Code can be obtained by looking at webVersion of your git dashboard for the last commit on the branch    This way you can get synchronized with the last commit on the branch    You can do git pull after you have successfully completed the hard reset to confirm nothing new to syn i e  you get to see the message    Your branch is up to date with Origin  lt Branch Name gt

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If you get your local repo into a complete mess  then a reliable way to throw away local commits in Git is to      Use  git config --get remote origin url  to get URL of remote origin Rename local git folder to  my broken local repo  Use  git clone  lt url from 1 gt   to get fresh local copy of remote git repository   In my experience Eclipse handles the world changing around it quite well   However  you may need to select affected projects in Eclipse and clean them to force Eclipse to rebuild them   I guess other IDEs may need a forced rebuild too   A side benefit of the above procedure is that you will find out if your project relies on local files that were not put into git   If you find you are missing files then you can copy them in from  my broken local repo  and add them to git   Once you have confidence that your new local repo has everything you need then you can delete  my broken local repo

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If your excess commits are only visible to you  you can just do  git reset --hard origin  lt branch name gt   to move back to where the origin is  This will reset the state of the repository to the previous commit  and it will discard all local changes   Doing a git revert makes new commits to remove old commits in a way that keeps everyone s history sane

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Remove untracked files  uncommitted local changes   git clean -df   Permanently deleting all local commits and get latest remote commit  git reset --hard origin  lt branch name gt

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For those interested in the Visual Studio solution  here is the drill    In the Team Explorer window  connect to the target repo   Then from Branches  right-click the branch of interest and select View history   Right-click a commit in the History window and choose Reset - gt  Delete changes  --hard     That will throw away your local commits and reset the state of your repo to the selected commit  I e  Your changes after you pulled the repo will be lost

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Find the sha1 for the commit you want to revert to  za  git reflog     snip     cf42fa2    HEAD  0   commit  fixed misc bugs     cf42fa2    HEAD  84   commit  fixed params for       73b9363    HEAD  85   commit  Don t symlink to themes on deployment  547cc1b    HEAD  86   commit  Deploy to effectif com web server  1dc3298    HEAD  87   commit  Updated the theme  18c3f51    HEAD  88   commit  Verify with Google webmaster tools  26fbb9c    HEAD  89   checkout  moving to effectif  And then use --mixed flag so that you  quot reset HEAD and index quot   za  git reset --mixed cf42fa2  Available flags  za  git reset -h  -q  --quiet           be quiet  only report errors --mixed               reset HEAD and index --soft                reset only HEAD --hard                reset HEAD  index and working tree --merge               reset HEAD  index and working tree --keep                reset HEAD but keep local changes --recurse-submodules   lt reset gt                         control recursive updating of submodules -p  --patch           select hunks interactively -N  --intent-to-add

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To see get the SHA-1 id of the commit you want to come back too  gitk --all   To roll back to that commit  git reset --hard sha1 id    Note  All the commits that were made after that commit will be deleted  and all your modification to the project   So first better clone the project to another branch or copy to another directory

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Try   git reset --hard  lt the sha1 hash gt    to reset your head to wherever you want to be  Use gitk to see which commit you want to be at  You can do reset within gitk as well

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If you are using Atlassian SourceTree app  you could use the reset option in the context menu

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If  Your branch is ahead of  origin XXX  by 5 commits   You can issue   git reset --hard HEAD 5   And it should remove the last 5 commits

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If you just want to throw away local commits and keep the modifications done in files then do git reset    Other answers addressed the hard reset

[git] Throw away local commits in Git

Examples related to git