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This article will discuss how to undo the latest commit in Git. This comes in handy when we want to remove the changes introduced by a commit before pushing it to the remote repository.

Let’s get right into it.

Undo last commit in Git without modifying files

We'll start things off by discussing how to undo a commit when we have made previous modifications to a file. To do this, we use the command with -softthe -p parameter git resetto instruct Git to keep the contents of our file.

$ git reset --soft HEAD~1

The above command will remove HEADthe last commit on our .

Let's look at an example. This is the commit history in our local repository.

$ git log --oneline --graph
* c5bf6c8  (HEAD -> master) Added a new file named "file.txt"
* 3b641e0  Second commit
* 21ca1e7  Initial commit

Let's run git resetthe command and check its effect on our local repository.

The output above shows that our file.txtis in our index, but the commit does not exist. We can make modifications to the file and commit it again.

$ git log --oneline --graph
* c5bf6c8  (HEAD -> master) (HEAD)
* 3b641e0  Second commit (HEAD~1)
* 21ca1e7  Initial commit (HEAD~2)

Our command $ git reset --soft HEAD~1removed the last commit. If we wanted to remove the last two commits, we would instead use , $ git reset --soft HEAD~2and so on.

Sometimes, we may want to eliminate commits and files. We use the -d rm command with -hardthe -p option git resetas shown below.

$ git reset --hard HEAD~1

The above command will remove all modifications associated with the commit from our index and working directory.

Let's look at an example. Here is a visualization of our commit history.

$ git log --oneline --graph
* c5bf6c8  (HEAD -> master) Added a new file named "file.txt"
* 3b641e0  Second commit
* 21ca1e7  Initial commit

In this case, we want to remove the last commit and undo the modifications.

We run:

$ git reset --hard HEAD~1
HEAD is now at 3b641e0 Second commit

Let's run git statusthe command to check the status of our repo.

The output above shows that Git deleted the files from our index and working directory.

We may also need to undo the last commit and keep the changes in the working directory, but on our index. To do this, we git resetadd --mixedthe undo option to the undo command, as shown below.

$ git reset --mixed HEAD~1

Let's look at an example. This is the current state of our commit history.

$ git log --oneline --graph
* c5bf6c8  (HEAD -> master) Added a new file named "file.txt"
* 3b641e0  Second commit
* 21ca1e7  Initial commit

We run:

$ git reset --mixed HEAD~1

Our file should be visible in the working directory, but not in the index. Let's git statusconfirm this with the command.

We can see our file.txtunder Untracked Files. This is another way to undo a commit while keeping your modifications.