In plain English what does git reset do

Question

I have seen interesting posts explaining subtleties about git reset   Unfortunately  the more I read about it  the more it appears that I don t understand it fully  I come from a SVN background and Git is a whole new paradigm  I got mercurial easily  but Git is much more technical   I think git reset is close to hg revert  but it seems there are differences   So what exactly does git reset do  Please include detailed explanations about    the options --hard  --soft and --merge  the strange notation you use with HEAD such as HEAD  and HEAD 1  concrete use cases and work flows  consequences on the working copy  the HEAD and your global stress level

User · Answer

Checkout points the head at a specific commit.

Reset points a branch at a specific commit. (A branch is a pointer to a commit.)

~~Incidentally, if your head doesn’t point to a commit that’s also pointed to by a branch then you have a detached head.~~ _{(turned out to be wrong. See comments...)}

User · Answer

Please be aware  this is a simplified explanation intended as a first step in seeking to understand this complex functionality   May be helpful for visual learners who want to visualise what their project state looks like after each of these commands     For those who use Terminal with colour turned on   git config --global color ui auto     git reset --soft A and you will see B and C s stuff in green  staged and ready to commit    git reset --mixed A  or git reset A  and you will see B and C s stuff in red  unstaged and ready to be staged  green  and then committed    git reset --hard A and you will no longer see B and C s changes anywhere  will be as if they never existed     Or for those who use a GUI program like  Tower  or  SourceTree   git reset --soft A and you will see B and C s stuff in the  staged files  area ready to commit  git reset --mixed A  or git reset A  and you will see B and C s stuff in the  unstaged files  area ready to be moved to staged and then committed  git reset --hard A and you will no longer see B and C s changes anywhere  will be as if they never existed

User · Answer

Remember that in git you have    the HEAD pointer  which tells you what commit you re working on the working tree  which represents the state of the files on your system the staging area  also called the index   which  stages  changes so that they can later be committed together      Please include detailed explanations about       --hard  --soft and --merge    In increasing order of dangerous-ness    --soft moves HEAD but doesn t touch the staging area or the working tree  --mixed moves HEAD and updates the staging area  but not the working tree  --merge moves HEAD  resets the staging area  and tries to move all the changes in your working tree into the new working tree  --hard moves HEAD and adjusts your staging area and working tree to the new HEAD  throwing away everything       concrete use cases and workflows     Use --soft when you want to move to another commit and patch things up without  losing your place   It s pretty rare that you need this    --    git reset --soft example touch foo                               Add a file  make some changes  git add foo                              git commit -m  bad commit message       Commit    D oh  that was a mistake  git reset --soft HEAD                   Go back one commit and fix things  git commit -m  good commit              There  now it s right    --   Use --mixed  which is the default  when you want to see what things look like at another commit  but you don t want to lose any changes you already have  Use --merge when you want to move to a new spot but incorporate the changes you already have into that the working tree  Use --hard to wipe everything out and start a fresh slate at the new commit

User · Answer

TL DR     git reset resets Staging to the last commit  Use --hard to also reset files in your Working directory to the last commit     LONGER VERSION  But that s obviously simplistic hence the many rather verbose answers  It made more sense for me to read up on git reset in the context of undoing changes  E g  see this      If git revert is a    safe    way to undo changes  you can think of git   reset as the dangerous method  When you undo with git reset and the   commits are no longer referenced by any ref or the reflog   there is   no way to retrieve the original copy   it is a permanent undo  Care must   be taken when using this tool  as it   s one of the only Git commands that has the potential to lose your work    From https   www atlassian com git tutorials undoing-changes git-reset   and this     On the commit-level  resetting is a way to move the tip of a branch to a different commit  This can be used to remove commits from the current branch    From https   www atlassian com git tutorials resetting-checking-out-and-reverting commit-level-operations

User · Answer

When you commit something to git you first have to stage  add to the index  your changes  This means you have to git add all the files you want to have included in this commit before git considers them part of the commit  Let s first have a look over the image of a git repo    so  its simple now  We have to work in working directory  creating files  directories and all  These changes are untracked changes  To make them tracked  we need to add them to git index by using git add command  Once they are added to git index  We can now commit these changes  if we want to push it to git repository   But suddenly we came to know while commiting that we have one extra file which we added in index is not required to push in git repository  It means we don t want that file in index  Now the question is how to remove that file from git index  Since we used git add to put them in the index it would be logical to use git rm  Wrong  git rm will simply delete the file and add the deletion to the index  So what to do now   Use -     git reset   It Clears your index  leaves your working directory untouched   simply unstaging everything    It can be used with number of options with it  There are three main options to use with git reset  --hard  --soft and --mixed  These affect what get   s reset in addition to the HEAD pointer when you reset   First  --hard resets everything  Your current directory would be exactly as it would if you had been following that branch all along  The working directory and the index are changed to that commit  This is the version that I use most often  git reset --hard is something like svn revert    Next  the complete opposite     soft  does not reset the working tree nor the index  It only moves the HEAD pointer  This leaves your current state with any changes different than the commit you are switching to in place in your directory  and    staged    for committing  If you make a commit locally but haven   t pushed the commit to the git server  you can reset to the previous commit  and recommit with a good commit message   Finally  --mixed resets the index  but not the working tree  So the changes are all still there  but are    unstaged    and would need to be git add   ed or git commit -a  we use this sometimes if we committed more than we meant to with git commit -a  we can back out the commit with git reset --mixed  add the things that we want to commit and just commit those   Difference between git revert and git reset  -    In simple words  git reset is a command to  fix-uncommited mistakes  and git revert is a command to  fix-commited mistake    It means if we have made some error in some change and commited and pushed the same to git repo  then git revert is the solution  And if in case we have identified the same error before pushing commiting  we can use git reset to fix the issue    I hope it will help you to get rid of your confusion

User · Answer

In general  git reset s function is to take the current branch and reset it to point somewhere else  and possibly bring the index and work tree along  More concretely  if your master branch  currently checked out  is like this   - A - B - C  HEAD  master    and you realize you want master to point to B  not C  you will use git reset B to move it there   - A - B  HEAD  master         - C is still here  but there s no branch pointing to it anymore   Digression  This is different from a checkout  If you d run git checkout B  you d get this   - A - B  HEAD  - C  master    You ve ended up in a detached HEAD state  HEAD  work tree  index all match B  but the master branch was left behind at C  If you make a new commit D at this point  you ll get this  which is probably not what you want   - A - B - C  master                   D  HEAD    Remember  reset doesn t make commits  it just updates a branch  which is a pointer to a commit  to point to a different commit  The rest is just details of what happens to your index and work tree   Use cases  I cover many of the main use cases for git reset within my descriptions of the various options in the next section  It can really be used for a wide variety of things  the common thread is that all of them involve resetting the branch  index  and or work tree to point to match a given commit    Things to be careful of   --hard can cause you to really lose work  It modifies your work tree  git reset  options  commit can cause you to  sort of  lose commits  In the toy example above  we lost commit C  It s still in the repo  and you can find it by looking at git reflog show HEAD or git reflog show master  but it s not actually accessible from any branch anymore  Git permanently deletes such commits after 30 days  but until then you can recover C by pointing a branch at it again  git checkout C  git branch  lt new branch name gt      Arguments  Paraphrasing the man page  most common usage is of the form git reset   lt commit gt    paths      which will reset the given paths to their state from the given commit  If the paths aren t provided  the entire tree is reset  and if the commit isn t provided  it s taken to be HEAD  the current commit   This is a common pattern across git commands  e g  checkout  diff  log  though the exact semantics vary   so it shouldn t be too surprising   For example  git reset other-branch path to foo resets everything in path to foo to its state in other-branch  git reset --   resets the current directory to its state in HEAD  and a simple git reset resets everything to its state in HEAD   The main work tree and index options  There are four main options to control what happens to your work tree and index during the reset   Remember  the index is git s  staging area  - it s where things go when you say git add in preparation to commit    --hard makes everything match the commit you ve reset to  This is the easiest to understand  probably  All of your local changes get clobbered  One primary use is blowing away your work but not switching commits  git reset --hard means git reset --hard HEAD  i e  don t change the branch but get rid of all local changes  The other is simply moving a branch from one place to another  and keeping index work tree in sync  This is the one that can really make you lose work  because it modifies your work tree  Be very very sure you want to throw away local work before you run any reset --hard  --mixed is the default  i e  git reset means git reset --mixed  It resets the index  but not the work tree  This means all your files are intact  but any differences between the original commit and the one you reset to will show up as local modifications  or untracked files  with git status  Use this when you realize you made some bad commits  but you want to keep all the work you ve done so you can fix it up and recommit  In order to commit  you ll have to add files to the index again  git add       --soft doesn t touch the index or work tree  All your files are intact as with --mixed  but all the changes show up as changes to be committed with git status  i e  checked in in preparation for committing   Use this when you realize you ve made some bad commits  but the work s all good - all you need to do is recommit it differently  The index is untouched  so you can commit immediately if you want - the resulting commit will have all the same content as where you were before you reset  --merge was added recently  and is intended to help you abort a failed merge  This is necessary because git merge will actually let you attempt a merge with a dirty work tree  one with local modifications  as long as those modifications are in files unaffected by the merge  git reset --merge resets the index  like --mixed - all changes show up as local modifications   and resets the files affected by the merge  but leaves the others alone  This will hopefully restore everything to how it was before the bad merge  You ll usually use it as git reset --merge  meaning git reset --merge HEAD  because you only want to reset away the merge  not actually move the branch   HEAD hasn t been updated yet  since the merge failed   To be more concrete  suppose you ve modified files A and B  and you attempt to merge in a branch which modified files C and D  The merge fails for some reason  and you decide to abort it  You use git reset --merge  It brings C and D back to how they were in HEAD  but leaves your modifications to A and B alone  since they weren t part of the attempted merge    Want to know more   I do think man git reset is really quite good for this - perhaps you do need a bit of a sense of the way git works for them to really sink in though  In particular  if you take the time to carefully read them  those tables detailing states of files in index and work tree for all the various options and cases are very very helpful   But yes  they re very dense - they re conveying an awful lot of the above information in a very concise form    Strange notation  The  strange notation   HEAD  and HEAD 1  you mention is simply a shorthand for specifying commits  without having to use a hash name like 3ebe3f6  It s fully documented in the  specifying revisions  section of the man page for git-rev-parse  with lots of examples and related syntax  The caret and the tilde actually mean different things    HEAD  is short for HEAD 1 and means the commit s first parent  HEAD 2 means the commit s first parent s first parent  Think of HEAD n as  n commits before HEAD  or  the nth generation ancestor of HEAD   HEAD   or HEAD 1  also means the commit s first parent  HEAD 2 means the commit s second parent  Remember  a normal merge commit has two parents - the first parent is the merged-into commit  and the second parent is the commit that was merged  In general  merges can actually have arbitrarily many parents  octopus merges   The   and   operators can be strung together  as in HEAD 3 2  the second parent of the third-generation ancestor of HEAD  HEAD  2  the second parent of the first parent of HEAD  or even HEAD     which is equivalent to HEAD 3

User · Answer

The post Reset Demystified in the blog Pro Git gives a very no-brainer explanation on git reset and git checkout   After all the helpful discussion at the top of that post  the author reduces the rules to the following simple three steps      That is basically it  The reset command overwrites these three trees in a specific order  stopping when you tell it to          Move whatever branch HEAD points to  stop if --soft    THEN  make the Index look like that  stop here unless --hard    THEN  make the Working Directory look like that          There are also --merge and --keep options  but I would rather keep things simpler for now - that will be for another article

[git] In plain English, what does "git reset" do?

Examples related to git

Examples related to reset