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This article outlines the steps required to revert a reverted Git commit. By the end of this article, you will have the necessary knowledge to recover a reverted commit without rewriting your commit history.

Recovering a reverted Git commit

Let's look at the following example.

In our repository we have the commit history as shown below.

We can revert our first commit using the git revert command as shown below.

$ git revert 9735f67

This command opens a text editor where we will provide the commit message for the revert.

How can we recover it without rewriting our commit history?

In this case, we have to create a new commit for the revert. For this case, you can use two commands.

The first method involves git cherry-pickthe revert command. We will use the revert command with the commit hash of the commit that was made before the revert commit (ie HEAD@{1}). We will run the command below.

$ git cherry-pick 9735f67

Output:

$ git cherry-pick 9735f67
[master 8fdc845] Rollback
 Date: Wed Aug 24 09:00:15 2022 +0300
 2 files changed, 11 insertions(+), 6 deletions(-)

This command will create a copy of the specified commit and apply it to your working tree. You do not need to add or commit anything, as the command adds a new commit to the repository.

The second method involves reverting a revert. As shown below, we will use the git revert command to revert our first revert.

$ git revert bb1c611

This commit will open a text editor where we will provide a new commit message for the revert. Once completed, we can push to the remote repository without rewriting our commit history.

In summary, Git allows us to recover reverted Git commits. The git cherry-pick and git revert commands come in handy when we want to un-revert reverted commits without rewriting the commit history.