What is difference between git reset --hard HEAD 1 and git reset --soft HEAD 1

Question

I tried to undo my commit in git  Is it dangerous to use git reset --hard HEAD 1   What is the difference between different options for git reset

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

git reset does know five  quot modes quot   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  soft 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  quot removed quot  before  mixed This is the default mode and quite similar to soft  When  quot removing quot  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  quot redo quot  the commit  you will have to add the changes  git add  before commiting  hard 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  Bonus keep 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  quot deleted quot  with git reset by finding it s SHA-1 key  for example with a command such as git reflog

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

[git] What is difference between 'git reset --hard HEAD~1' and 'git reset --soft HEAD~1'?

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