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Advanced Git

Third Edition · Git 2.50 · Console

Before You Begin

Section 0: 6 chapters
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Section I: Advanced Git

Section 1: 7 chapters
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Section II: Git Workflows

Section 2: 5 chapters
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7. The Many Faces of Undo
Written by Jawwad Ahmad

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One of the best aspects of Git is the fact that it remembers everything. You can always go back through the history of your commits with git log, see the history of your team’s activities and cherry-pick commits from other places.

But one of the most frustrating aspects of Git is also that it remembers everything. At some point, you’ll inevitably create a commit that you didn’t want or that contains something you didn’t intend to include.

While you can’t rewrite shared history, you can get your repository back into working order without a lot of hassle.

In this chapter, you’ll learn how to use the reset, reflog and revert commands to undo mistakes in your repository. While doing so, you’ll find a new appreciation for Git’s infallible memory.

Working with git reset

Developers quickly become familiar with the git reset command, usually out of frustration. Most people see git reset as a “scorched earth” approach to fix a repository that’s messed up beyond repair. But when you delve deeper into how the command works, you’ll find that reset can be useful for more than a last-ditch effort to get things working again.

To learn how reset works, it’s worth revisiting another command you’re intimately familiar with: checkout.

Comparing reset with checkout

Take the example below, where the branch mybranch is a straightforward branch off of main:

Working with the three flavors of reset

Remember that Git needs to track three things: your working directory, the staging area and the internal repository index. Depending on your needs, you can provide parameters to reset to roll back either all those things or just a selection:

Testing git reset –hard

git reset --hard is most people’s first introduction to “undoing” things in Git. The --hard option says to Git, “Please forget about the grievous things I’ve done to my repository and restore my entire environment to the commit I’ve specified”.

Removing an utterly useless directory

Start by going to the command line and navigating to the root directory of your repository. Execute the following command to get rid of that pesky js directory, which doesn’t look very important:

Restoring your directory

In this case, you want to return to the last commit before you made your blunder. You don’t even need to know the commit hash; you can provide relative references to git reset instead.

Trying out git reset --mixed

Imagine that you’re working on another software project. You’re up late, the coffee ran out hours ago and you’re tired. That never happens in real life, of course, but bear with me.

Removing your unwanted commit

You could use git reset HEAD~ --hard, as above, but that would blow away hours of hard work. Instead, use git reset --mixed to reset the commit index and the staging area, but leave your working directory alone.

Using git reset –soft

If you like to build up commits bit by bit, staging changes as you make them, then you may encounter a situation where you’ve staged various changes and committed them prematurely.

Making a mistake

Just before you add that to the staging area, Will and Xanthe call you excitedly with their plans for their next big project: to create a — wait for it — magic triangle generator. You humor them for a while, then turn your attention back to your project.

Cleaning up your commit

So now, you need to clean up that commit so it includes both the change to README.md and the addition of setup.config.

Using git reflog

You know that Git remembers everything, but you probably don’t realize just how deep Git’s memory goes.

Finding old commits

You’ve rethought your changes above. Putting configuration elements in a separate file in the repo along with instructions isn’t the best way to go about things. It obviously makes more sense to put those settings, along with Sam’s mobile number, on the main wiki page for this project.

Recovering your commit with git checkout

Even though you usually use git checkout to switch between branches, as you saw way back at the beginning of this chapter, you can use git checkout and specify a commit hash, or in this case, a reflog entry, to create a detached HEAD state. You’ll do that now.

Checking that your changes worked

Look at your commit tree again with git log --oneline --graph --all and you’ll see something like this:

Using git revert

In all of this work with git reset and git reflog, you haven’t pushed anything to a remote repository. That’s by design. Remember, you can’t change shared history. Once you’ve pushed something, it’s a lot harder to get rid of a commit since you have to synchronize with everyone else.

Setting up your merge

First, merge in that branch. Ensure you’re on main to start:

Reverting your changes

While you can’t change shared history, you can at least revert the changes you’ve made here to get back to the previous commit.

Key points

Congratulations on finishing this chapter! Here’s a quick recap of what you’ve covered:

Where to go from here?

You’ve already covered quite a lot in this chapter, but I recommend reading a bit more about how relative references work in Git.

6. Gitignore After the Fact
8. Centralized Workflow
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