Undoing a git rebase

Question

Does anybody know how to easily undo a git rebase   The only way that comes to mind is to go at it manually    git checkout the commit parent to both of the branches  then create a temp branch from there cherry-pick all commits by hand replace the branch in which I rebased by the manually-created branch   In my current situation this is gonna work because I can easily spot commits from both branches  one was my stuff  the other was my colleague s stuff    However my approach strikes me as suboptimal and error-prone  let s say I had just rebased with 2 of my own branches    Any ideas   Clarification  I m talking about a rebase during which a bunch of commits were replayed  Not only one

User · Accepted Answer

The easiest way would be to find the head commit of the branch as it was immediately before the rebase started in the reflog...

git reflog

and to reset the current branch to it (with the usual caveats about being absolutely sure before reseting with the --hard option).

Suppose the old commit was HEAD@{5} in the ref log:

git reset --hard HEAD@{5}

In Windows, you may need to quote the reference:

git reset --hard "HEAD@{5}"

You can check the history of the candidate old head by just doing a git log HEAD@{5} (Windows: git log "HEAD@{5}").

If you've not disabled per branch reflogs you should be able to simply do git reflog branchname@{1} as a rebase detaches the branch head before reattaching to the final head. I would double check this, though as I haven't verified this recently.

Per default, all reflogs are activated for non-bare repositories:

[core]
    logAllRefUpdates = true

User · Answer

It annoys me to no end that none of these answers is fully automatic  despite the fact that it should be automatable  at least mostly    I created a set of aliases to try to remedy this    Useful commands                      Undo the last rebase undo-rebase    quot   f       git reset   PREV COMMIT  git x-rev-before-rebase   amp  amp  git reset --merge   quot  PREV COMMIT  quot    quot     quot     f quot     See what changed since the last rebase rdiff    quot  f       git diff   git diff  git x-rev-before-rebase   quot    quot     f quot     Helpers            Get the revision before the last rebase started x-rev-before-rebase    git reflog --skip 1 -1   quot  git x-start-of-rebase   quot  --format   quot  gD  quot     Get the revision that started the rebase x-start-of-rebase   reflog --grep-reflog   rebase  start   -1 --format  quot  gD quot   You should be able to tweak this to allow going back an arbitrary number of rebases pretty easily  juggling the args is the trickiest part   which can be useful if you do a number of rebases in quick succession and mess something up along the way  Caveats It will get confused if any commit messages begin with  quot rebase  start  quot   please don t do this    You could make the regex more resilient to improve the situation by matching something like this for your regex  --grep-reflog  quot  rebase  start   checkout  quot    WARNING  not tested  regex may need adjustments  The reason I haven t done this is because I m not 100  that a rebase always begins with a checkout   Can anyone confirm this   If you re curious about the null     commands at the beginning of the function  that s a way of setting up bash completions for the aliases

User · Answer

What I usually do is  git reset  commit hash  to the last commit where I think rebase had no effect   then     git pull  Now your branch should match exactly like master and rebased commits should not be in it   Now one can just cherry-pick the commits on this branch

User · Answer

Following the solution of  Allan and  Zearin  I wish I could simply do a comment though but I don t enough reputation  so I have used the following command   Instead of doing git rebase -i --abort   note the -i  I had to simply do git rebase --abort  without the -i    Using both -i and --abort at the same time causes Git to show me a list of usage options   So my previous and current branch status with this solution is   matbhz myPc  my project environment  branch-123 REBASE-i    git rebase --abort  matbhz myPc  my project environment  branch-123

User · Answer

git reset --hard origin  branchName   is the correct solution to reset all your local changes done by rebase

User · Answer

Actually  rebase saves your starting point to ORIG HEAD so this is usually as simple as   git reset --hard ORIG HEAD   However  the reset  rebase and merge all save your original HEAD pointer into ORIG HEAD so  if you ve done any of those commands since the rebase you re trying to undo then you ll have to use the reflog

User · Answer

If you successfully rebased against remote branch and can not git rebase --abort you still can do some tricks to save your work and don t have forced pushes  Suppose your current branch that was rebased by mistake is called your-branch and is tracking origin your-branch   git branch -m your-branch-rebased   rename current branch git checkout origin your-branch   checkout to latest state that is known to origin git checkout -b your-branch check git log your-branch-rebased  compare to git log your-branch and define commits that are missing from your-branch git cherry-pick COMMIT HASH for every commit in your-branch-rebased push your changes  Please aware that two local branches are associated with remote your-branch and you should push only your-branch

User · Answer

Using reflog didn t work for me   What worked for me was similar to as described here  Open the file in  git logs refs named after the branch that was rebased and find the line that contains  rebase finsihed   something like   5fce6b51 88552c8f Kris Leech  lt me example com gt  1329744625  0000  rebase finished  refs heads integrate onto 9e460878   Checkout the second commit listed on the line   git checkout 88552c8f   Once confirmed this contained my lost changes I branched and let out a sigh of relief   git log git checkout -b lost changes

User · Answer

For multiple commits  remember that any commit references all the history leading up to that commit  So in Charles  answer  read  the old commit  as  the newest of the old commits   If you reset to that commit  then all the history leading up to that commit will reappear  This should do what you want

User · Answer

If you are on a branch you can use   git reset --hard   1    There is not only a reference log for HEAD  obtained by git reflog   there are also reflogs for each branch  obtained by git reflog  lt branch gt    So  if you are on master then git reflog master will list all changes to that branch  You can refer to that changes by master  1   master  2   etc   git rebase will usually change HEAD multiple times but the current branch will be updated only once     1  is simply a shortcut for the current branch  so it s equal to master  1  if you are on master   git reset --hard ORIG HEAD will not work if you used git reset during an interactive rebase

User · Answer

If you mess something up within a git rebase  e g  git rebase --abort  while you have uncommitted files  they will be lost and git reflog will not help  This happened to me and you will need to think outside the box here  If you are lucky like me and use IntelliJ Webstorm then you can right-click- gt local history and can revert to a previous state of your file folders no matter what mistakes you have done with versioning software  It is always good to have another failsafe running

User · Answer

In case you had pushed your branch to remote repository  usually it s origin  and then you ve done a succesfull rebase  without merge   git rebase --abort gives  No rebase in progress   you can easily reset branch using  command      git reset --hard origin  branchName    Example       work projects  ProjectName    git status On branch  branchName  Your branch is ahead of  origin  branchName   by 135 commits     use  git push  to publish your local commits   nothing to commit  working directory clean      work projects  ProjectName    git reset --hard origin  branchName  HEAD is now at 6df5719  Commit message        work projects  ProjectName    git status On branch  branchName  Your branch is up-to-date with  origin  branchName    nothing to commit  working directory clean

User · Answer

If you don t want to do a hard reset    You can checkout the commit from the reflog  and then save it as a new branch  git reflog  Find the commit just before you started rebasing  You may need to scroll further down to find it  press Enter or PageDown   Take note of the HEAD number and replace 57  git checkout HEAD  57   Review the branch commits  and if it s correct then create a new branch using this HEAD  git checkout -b new branch name

User · Answer

I tried all suggestions with reset and reflog without any success  Restoring local history of IntelliJ resolved the problem of lost files

User · Answer

Charles s answer works  but you may want to do this  git rebase --abort  to clean up after the reset  Otherwise  you may get the message    Interactive rebase already started

User · Answer

I actually put a backup tag on the branch before I do any nontrivial operation  most rebases are trivial  but I d do that if it looks anywhere complex    Then  restoring is as easy as git reset --hard BACKUP

User · Answer

Let s say I rebase master to my feature branch and I get 30 new commits which break something  I ve found that often it s easiest to just remove the bad commits   git rebase -i HEAD 31   Interactive rebase for the last 31 commits  it doesn t hurt if you pick way too many    Simply take the commits that you want to get rid of and mark them with  d  instead of  pick   Now the commits are deleted effectively undoing the rebase  if you remove only the commits you just got when rebasing

User · Answer

Resetting the branch to the dangling commit object of its old tip is of course the best solution  because it restores the previous state without expending any effort  But if you happen to have lost those commits  f ex  because you garbage-collected your repository in the meantime  or this is a fresh clone   you can always rebase the branch again  The key to this is the --onto switch   Let   s say you had a topic branch imaginatively called topic  that you branched off master when the tip of master was the 0deadbeef commit  At some point while on the topic branch  you did git  160 rebase  160 master  Now you want to undo this  Here   s how   git rebase --onto 0deadbeef master topic   This will take all commits on topic that aren   t on master and replay them on top of 0deadbeef   With --onto  you can rearrange your history into pretty much any shape whatsoever   Have fun   -

[git] Undoing a git rebase

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