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This article discusses various methods we can use to discard local changes in Git. Assuming we have cloned a repository, we will see how to discard the following local changes.

1. Phased changes
2. Unstaged changes
3. Untracked changes
4. Committed changes
5. Committing and pushing changes

Various methods for removing local Git changes

Assuming we have just cloned a Git repository, made some file changes, and staged the files to be committed, how do we discard those files?

We can discard the staged changes using the command with the --hard flag git reset. Run the command as shown below.

$ git reset --hard

In the next scenario, we have made changes to some files in the repo, but we are not ready to commit yet. How do we discard these changes?

We have two options; we can use git reset --hardthe command or git checkout <file>the command. If you are dealing with multiple files, run the latter as shown below.

$ git checkout .

This will instruct Git to revert all files to their last committed state, discarding any unstaged changes.

Let's take another scenario where we introduce new files into the repository. These files will be untracked files.

How do we delete these files?

git cleancommand does the job. Here is how to run the command.

$ git clean -f

The effects of this command are irreversible. It is recommended to run the command as a dry run to see what will be lost.

You can run the command as shown below.

$ git clean -f -n

You can add the -d flag to remove untracked directories.

If you don't want to discard changes but want them out of the index, you can stash them. Stash in Git means storing changes to the index safely somewhere else.

When you need them, run git stash popthe command.

What if we have already committed some changes and need to eliminate them?

At this point, we need to move the HEAD pointer to the parent of the most recently created commit. We will use git reset --hardthe command as shown below.

$ git reset --hard HEAD~1

This will eliminate HEAD@{0}the changes introduced by the commit at .

You can also run git reset --hard@{u}to discard local commits in a branch and make it identical to the upstream tracking branch.

If you have already committed your changes, you can create a commit to revert the changes you made to the file and push it to the remote.

$ git revert <commit-hash>

This will create a new commit that you can push to the remote.

In short, there are multiple ways we can use to eliminate local Git changes. Be careful when using public repositories.