Undoing git missteps

Git does not have an explicit undo command. You must use different strategies to undo different changes.

Commits are snapshots of the repository’s state at specific times in a project’s history. When you undo changes in git, you generally return to an earlier commit, while saving the changes you made so you can deploy the changes somewhere else.

You can’t undo some of these undos. If you undo changes in the wrong way, you may lose some work. This is why it’s useful to save the changes that you want to undo, so you can fetch them if necessary.

Scenarios

Each scenario in this article contains a link to a worked undo example.

You made changes in wrong-branch instead of your new_feature branch, but you haven’t committed them.

1. in <wrong-branch>, store the changes in a stack:

   git stash

   This command removes the changes from wrong-branch. To verify, execute git status.

2. Checkout the feature branch where you want to move the changes:

   git checkout <new-feature>

3. In <new-feature>, extract the stashed changes from the stack onto the correct branch:

   git stash pop

See Uncommitted changes in main for an example.

You want to delete uncommitted changes in the main branch

First, be absolutely sure that you don’t want to save the changes.

To discard the changes without saving them, and restore main, use git reset --hard. Run git status to confirm that the changes are deleted:

$ (main) git reset --hard HEAD
HEAD is now at 6dc91a0 Merge pull request #141 from cbudz/aap-396

$ (main) git status
On branch main
nothing to commit, working tree clean