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This article will teach you how to delete unpushed commits in Git.

Git is used in collaborative development environments to track changes made to files in a project directory. Git uses commits to track changes to local and remote Git repositories.

From time to time, one may wish to remove unpushed commits from a local Git repository.

Use git resetthe command to remove unpushed commits. We will illustrate this with an example.

Use git resetthe command to delete unpushed commits in Git

Whenever we want to commit changes to our project directory, we can commit the changes using the git addand git commitcommands.

When you use git committhe command, commits are created in the local Git repository. We can then use git pushthe command to push the commits in the local Git repository to the remote Git repository.

Sometimes, we may realize that we do not want to push the commit to the remote repository, but only commit to the local repository. In this case, we can use git resetthe command to cancel the commit or delete the last commit in the local Git repository.

git resetIs a command used to undo local changes to the state of a Git repository.

Assume we have made changes to our working directory. We can git statusview the status of the changes using the command.

$ git status
On branch main
Your branch is up to date with 'origin/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)
  (commit or discard the untracked or modified content in submodules)
        modified:   mynotes.txt

We can see that mynotes.txtthe file has been modified and is eligible for commit.

To commit our modifications, we need to first git addadd the changes to the staging index of our local Git repository using the command. We must run the command as follows git add.

$ git add .
$ git status
On branch main
Your branch is up to date with 'origin/main'.

Changes to be committed:
  (use "git restore --staged <file>..." to unstage)
        modified:   mynotes.txt

So when using git statusthe command we can see that the changes have now been staged.

We can commit the changes to our local Git repository. We have to use git committhe command to create a commit for the staged changes.

We run git committhe command as follows.

$ git commit -m "updated mynotes"
[main e1b08a5] updated mynotes
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)

Now, let's run git statusthe command again to check the status.

$ git status
On branch main
Your branch is ahead of 'origin/main' by 1 commit.
  (use "git push" to publish your local commits)

We can now see that the local branch in our local repository is origin/mainone commit ahead of the remote Git repository branch.

We can use git pushthe command to push the commits to the remote Git repository. But instead of doing that, we use git resetthe command to delete the unpushed commits as shown below.

$ git reset --soft HEAD~1

The command with --softthe -p option git resetremoves unpushed commits from the local Git repository, but keeps local changes. HEAD~1Specifying git reset-p to remove only the last commit removes the last commit.

We will now run git statusto check the status of the repository as shown below.

$ git status
On branch main
Your branch is up to date with 'origin/main'.

Changes to be committed:
  (use "git restore --staged <file>..." to unstage)
        modified:   mynotes.txt

So we can see that the unpushed commits are no longer there. However, the modifications are still in progress.

Using --hardthe -p option instead of --softthe -p command option and git resetthe -p command will remove HEAD~1the most recent commit specified by -p and complete your local changes.

We can --hardrun git resetthe command with the -p option.

$ git reset --hard HEAD~1

This will also remove untracked files or directories and tracked modifications. So use it with caution otherwise we may lose all the work we have done.

Therefore, we learned to delete unpushed commits in our local Git repository.