git reset
does know five "modes": soft, mixed, hard, merge and keep. I will start with the first three, since these are the modes you'll usually encounter. After that you'll find a nice little a bonus, so stay tuned.
When using git reset --soft HEAD~1
you will remove the last commit from the current branch, but the file changes will stay in your working tree. Also the changes will stay on your index, so following with a git commit
will create a commit with the exact same changes as the commit you "removed" before.
This is the default mode and quite similar to soft. When "removing" a commit with git reset HEAD~1
you will still keep the changes in your working tree but not on the index; so if you want to "redo" the commit, you will have to add the changes (git add
) before commiting.
When using git reset --hard HEAD~1
you will lose all uncommited changes in addition to the changes introduced in the last commit. The changes won't stay in your working tree so doing a git status
command will tell you that you don't have any changes in your repository.
Tread carefully with this one. If you accidentally remove uncommited changes which were never tracked by git
(speak: committed or at least added to the index), you have no way of getting them back using git
.
git reset --keep HEAD~1
is an interesting and useful one. It only resets the files which are different between the current HEAD
and the given commit. It aborts the reset if one or more of these files has uncommited changes. It basically acts as a safer version of hard
.
You can read more about that in the git reset documentation.
Note
When doing git reset
to remove a commit the commit isn't really lost, there just is no reference pointing to it or any of it's children. You can still recover a commit which was "deleted" with git reset
by finding it's SHA-1 key, for example with a command such as git reflog
.
Git reset has 5 main modes: soft, mixed, merged, hard, keep. The difference between them is to change or not change head, stage (index), working directory.
Git reset --hard will change head, index and working directory.
Git reset --soft will change head only. No change to index, working directory.
So in other words if you want to undo your commit, --soft should be good enough. But after that you still have the changes from bad commit in your index and working directory. You can modify the files, fix them, add them to index and commit again.
With the --hard, you completely get a clean slate in your project. As if there hasn't been any change from the last commit. If you are sure this is what you want then move forward. But once you do this, you'll lose your last commit completely. (Note: there are still ways to recover the lost commit).
This is the main difference between use git reset --hard and git reset --soft:
--soft
Does not touch the index file or the working tree at all (but resets the head to , just like all modes do). This leaves all your changed files "Changes to be committed", as git status would put it.
--hard
Resets the index and working tree. Any changes to tracked files in the working tree since are discarded.
This is a useful article which graphically shows the explanation of the reset command.
https://git-scm.com/docs/git-reset
Reset --hard can be quite dangerous as it overwrites your working copy without checking, so if you haven't commited the file at all, it is gone.
As for Source tree, there is no way I know of to undo commits. It would most likely use reset under the covers anyway
Source: Stackoverflow.com