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This article will discuss various ways to roll back a git repository to a previous commit. You can undo almost anything with Git.

We will look at local and remote repositories, and how to undo unpublished and published commits.

Delete unpublished commits to revert your Git repository to a previous commit

Unpublished commits are simply commits in your local repository that have not yet been pushed to the remote repository. We will explain this concept with an example.

Example 1:

Below is the commit history in our local repository. Note the combination provided for each commit message.

If for some reason we discover that a recent commit had an error, we can remove the commit and revert the repository to its previous state.

In our case, the bad commit should be ba4c699 (update name). We run git rest --hard <sha1-commit-hash>the command to remove this commit.

$ git reset --hard 00e1a53

Output:

HEAD is now at 00e1a53 Merge branch 'main' of https://github.com/Wachira11ke/Delftscopetech

The command above will return your repository to the specified commit and remove the commits after it. The command will also remove all uncommitted changes in your repository.

If you want to keep them and apply them after removing them, run the following command.

$ git stash
$ git reset --hard 00e1a53
$ git stash pop

This combination saves your uncommitted changes and applies them to the new workspace. If you have made modifications to the file, you may encounter merge errors.

Delete published commits to revert your Git repository to a previous commit

Published commits are the changes applied to the remote repository. If we push wrong changes from our local repository to the remote repository, we can revert the repository to a previous version.

It's worth reminding other developers not to fetch from the repository. Let's look at an example.

Example 2:

We have previously discussed how to delete commits in a local repository. Assume that we have already pushed the deleted commits to the remote repository.

In the following context, we can git pushrestore the remote repository using the command.

$ git push --force origin HEAD

The command above will overwrite our remote repository based on the state of our local repository. It will discard any changes made by other developers.

This is a safer option:

$ git push --force-with-lease oriin HEAD

You can specify a branch with the following command:

$ git push -f origin <sha1-commit-hash>:branch_name

Some remote repositories have a receive.denyNonFastForwardsdefault that rejects the command above. In this case, we will have to delete and recreate the branch.

$ git push origin : <branch name>
$ git push origin <sha1-commit-hash>:ref/heads/<branch name>