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This article will discuss restoring a Git repository based on commit ID. We may need to go back to an older commit to check its status or delete later commits.

Let us discuss both cases.

Temporarily switch to Git commit

We use git checkoutthe command to temporarily switch to an older commit while mentioning the commit ID.

$ git checkout <Commit ID>

This command will detach our repo HEAD(we are not checked out on a branch). In this state we cannot commit.

As shown below, we have to create a new branch based on the commit.

$ git switch -c <new-branch-name>

We can combine the above commands to do the same thing as shown below.

$ git checkout -b <new-branch-name> <Commit ID>

Restore a Git repository by commit ID

We use the --hardrollback git resetcommand with the -f flag while passing it the commit ID we want to roll back to. Run the following command.

$ git reset --hard <Commit ID>

Running this command will remove all our recent commits until the mentioned commit. The command will also remove any uncommitted changes in the index.

If you want to keep your changes, do the following:

$ git stash
$ git reset --hard <Commit ID>
$ git stash pop

If you want to update the remote repository, use the following git pushcommand.

$ git push -f

Be careful with this command as it will overwrite the remote repository with your local repository. Let's look at an example.

In the following example, we will try to restore our git repo based on the commit id Delftscopetech. Let's run git logthe command to list all the commits in our repo.

$ git log --oneline

If we wanted to go back Fourth Update, what would we do?

We run the command in the following context git reset.

$ git reset --hard df90895
HEAD is now at df90895 Fourth Update

The output shows that our HEADis now at Fourth Update. We can run git pushthe command to push the changes to our remote repository.

If you want to undo the reset, follow this.

First, we run git reflogthe command to see all reference updates in our repo.

$ git reflog

Your output will look similar. We can HEAD@{0}see our reset at .

To go back, we run git resetthe command as shown below.

$ git reset HEAD@{1}

Now let's check our commit history.

$ git log --oneline

Our HEADis back 第六次更新.

In short, it is very easy to restore your Git repository based on commit ID. If you want to temporarily switch to a commit, use git checkoutthe command.

To revert to a specific commit, use git reset --hardthe command and specify the commit hash.