Revert a file to a previous commit in Git
Git is a version control system. We use it to track changes made to files in a project directory. In a collaborative development environment, many team members often work on the same files and make changes to them.
We often face a situation where we no longer find the current version of a file's changes suitable for our purposes. So, in such cases, we want to revert such a file to a specific previous version of that file.
Using Git, we can accomplish reverting a file to a previous commit.
This tutorial will teach you how to revert a file to a previous commit in Git. We will illustrate this through an example.
Reverting a file to a previous commit in Git
We use Git in a collaborative development environment to track changes made to files. Git uses commits to accomplish the task of tracking changes to files.
Therefore, using the commit history of a file, we can view the various changes made to the file by different versions.
Often, we may encounter a situation where we find that the current version of a file no longer suits our needs. In addition, we find that a specific revision in the file's commit history better suits our current needs.
So, in this case, we want to revert the file to a previous version or commit in the commit history of the Git repository.
Suppose there is a file named in our project Git repository README.md. We can use git logthe command to browse the commit history of the file, as shown below.
$ git log --oneline README.md
814b51e Updated README.md, further notes
9cbe84d Updated README.md, added some notes
dfe8d6c Initial commit
We find that the SHA hash 9cbe84dgives README.mdthe version of the file at the commit we want.
To do this, we can use the command git checkout. The command syntax to revert a file to a previous commit is git checkout <commit> -- <file-to-revert>.
So we need to do the following to revert the file to the version given by the commit given by README.mdthe SHA hash .9cbe84d
$ git checkout 9cbe84d -- README.md
README.md9cbe84dThe file is reverted to a previous commit given by SHA hash .
Please note that you should use git checkoutthe command with caution. Local changes made to the file will be discarded. Git replaces the file with the given committed version.
Make sure to use it only if you are sure and don't want those unsaved local changes.
So, we showed how to revert a file to a previous commit in Git.
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