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This article is about removing changes from Git's staging area.

Sometimes, we may want to remove files or remove changes to files from the staging area. We can use git restorethe command to achieve this.

Use git restorethe command to remove changes from the Git staging area

When we finish making changes to files or when we want to add new files to our project directory, when it is tracked in a Git repository, we add those files to the repository.

We use git addthe command to add a file or changes to a file to the staging area or index of a repository in Git. We can then use git committhe command to create a commit and commit the changes to the Git repository.

Sometimes, before committing the changes, we may find that the new changes we added to the staging area are no longer valid. We want to remove these changes from the staging area instead of committing them.

For example, we have a file called in the project directory of the Git repository README.md. We now README.mdmake some changes to the file.

We can git statuscheck the status of the repository by running the command as shown below.

$ git status .
On branch main
Changes not staged for commit:
  (use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
  (use "git restore <file>..." to discard changes in working directory)
	modified:   README.md

We can see above git statusthat the command shows that the file README.mdhas been modified.

We can now README.mdadd the file modifications to the staging area. We can git adddo this using the command as shown below.

$ git add .

We can check the status of the repository again as shown below.

$ git status .
On branch main
Changes to be committed:
  (use "git restore --staged <file>..." to unstage)
	modified:   README.md

We can now see that README.mdthe modifications to the file are now in the staging area or index. The file status is now in Changes to be committed.

We can now decide to unstage the changes (i.e.) remove the modifications from the staging area using the -dest --stagedoption with the -s command. This information is shown in the -dest command above.git restoregit status

Therefore, we now run git restorethe command as follows.

$ git restore --staged README.md

We can now run git statusthe command again as shown below.

$ git status .
On branch main
Changes not staged for commit:
  (use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
  (use "git restore <file>..." to discard changes in working directory)
	modified:   README.md

We can see above that README.mdthe modifications to the file are no longer in the staging area (ie); the changes are not staged for commit.

So, we have learned how to remove changes from Git's staging area.