How to cancel a local git commit

Question

My issue is I have changed a file eg  README  added a new line  this for my testing line  and saved the file  then I issued the following commands   git status     On branch master    Changed but not updated        use  git add  lt file gt      to update what will be committed        use  git checkout --  lt file gt      to discard changes in working directory         modified    README     no changes added to commit  use  git add  and or  git commit -a      git add README   git commit -a -m  To add new line to readme    I didn t push the code to github  Now I want to cancel this commit   For this I used      git reset --hard HEAD 1   But I lost the newly added line  this for my testing line  from the README file  This should not happen  I need the content to be there  Is there a way to retain the content and cancel my local commit

User · Answer

The first thing you should do is to determine whether you want to keep the local changes before you delete the commit message.

Use git log to show current commit messages, then find the commit_id before the commit that you want to delete, not the commit you want to delete.

If you want to keep the locally changed files, and just delete commit message:

git reset --soft commit_id

If you want to delete all locally changed files and the commit message:

git reset --hard commit_id

That's the difference of soft and hard

User · Answer

Just use git reset without the --hard flag   git reset HEAD 1   PS  On Unix based systems you can use HEAD  which is equal to HEAD 1  On Windows HEAD  will not work because   signals a line continuation  So your command prompt will just ask you More

User · Answer

Use below command     git reset HEAD 1   After this you also able to view files what revert back like below response   Unstaged changes after reset  M   application config config php M   application config database php

User · Answer

If you re in the middle of a commit  i e  in your editor already   you can cancel it by deleting all lines above the first    That will abort the commit   So you can delete all lines so that the commit message is empty  then save the file     You ll then get a message that says Aborting commit due to empty commit message    EDIT    You can also delete all the lines and the result will be exactly the same   To delete all lines in vim  if that is your default editor   once you re in the editor  type gg to go to the first line  then dG to delete all lines  Finally  write and quit the file with wq and your commit will be aborted

User · Answer

You can tell Git what to do with your index  set of files that will become the next commit  and working directory when performing git reset by using one of the parameters   --soft  Only commits will be reseted  while Index and the working directory are not altered   --mixed  This will reset the index to match the HEAD  while working directory will not be touched  All the changes will stay in the working directory and appear as modified   --hard  It resets everything  commits  index  working directory   to match the HEAD   In your case  I would use git reset --soft to keep your modified changes in Index and working directory  Be sure to check this out for a more detailed explanation

User · Answer

Use --soft instead of --hard flag   git reset --soft HEAD

[git] How to cancel a local git commit

If you want to keep the locally changed files, and just delete commit message:

If you want to delete all locally changed files and the commit message:

Examples related to git

Examples related to git-reset

Examples related to git-commit