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When we start working on a large project, we often encounter situations where we have to update, remove or add parts in a branch. If the development time span is long and there are strict deadlines, the maintenance of commit messages can become a hindrance for the team.

Therefore, in order to make it easier to maintain a clean commit history, we will learn in this article the usage of some common conditions that you may encounter when using Git.

Git provides us with some commands to remove our previous commits from a branch. The following section discusses the available strategies and commands.

There are several ways to delete or remove commits from a branch in Git. The first step is to figure out which technique is best for our scenario, depending on whether we have already pushed the commits to the repository.

Before trying this, we should note that executing these commands will delete our working directory changes. Also, note that git resetthere is a command that resets our working directory to the specified commit in case we want to keep our changes separate in the repository in the future.

Remove changes if not pushed to repository in Git

In a scenario where we have not yet pushed changes to the repository, the following command will be used.

git reset --hard HEAD~1

This will get rid of all working directory changes and move HEAD to the commit before HEAD.

Suppose we have to delete the commits upwards, until a specific commit. In this case, we will execute the command in the command line git logto find the specific commit ID, and then we will run the following command:

git reset --hard <sha1-commit-id>

This will ignore all working directory changes and move HEAD to the chosen commit.

Remove changes if pushed to a repository in Git

In another case, when we have already pushed our changes, we need to execute the following command.

git push origin HEAD --force 

Note that if someone else has already pulled the corresponding branch, it's better to start from the latest one. If we don't do this when someone else pulls, it will merge it into their work and we will have to push it back again.

If you ever get into a situation where you need to find a deleted commit, it will appear in unless we garbage collected the repository git reflog.

Remove deleted commits

To remove the deleted commits from our branch, we can use the following command:

git reset --soft HEAD^

This command will revert or reset all the changes from the previous commit and bring them back to a new commit in the repository.