JIYIK CN >

This article will discuss undoing what has been done on a Git branch rebase.

Rebasing is the operation of moving the base of a branch to a newer base. Suppose we have a feature branch that is based on the master branch. Then, the master branch has some new commits; we might want to rebase the feature branch based on these new commits.

We might reconsider this rebase. We no longer want new feature branches to be based on new commits in the master branch.

We want our feature branch to be based on the commits we made when we first branched it from the master branch. So in order to achieve this, we now need to undo rebasewhat we did on the branch.

We will now illustrate this with an example.

Use git reflogand git resetto undo changes done on a Git branchrebase

Suppose we have a mainbranch and we create a new branch on it feature1.

Suppose mainsome commits happened in the branch . We have feature1made a new branch based on these new commits rebase. This is what we want to undo.

To undo rebase, we can use Git's reflogundo command. Using undo git reflog, we can rebaseimmediately determine the head commit of the branch before we begin.

We will now run the command on the branch feature1( rebasethe one that is done with ).git reflog

$ git reflog

b745978 HEAD@{0}: rebase: that commit
4sd7c1c HEAD@{1}: rebase: this commit
adf3d3d HEAD@{2}: checkout: moving from main to feature1
...

We can see HEAD@{2}that is rebasethe commit before the operation.

We can git resetreset the branch to this commit using as shown below.

$ git reset HEAD@{2} --hard

After executing the above command, the branch feaure1is now in rebaseits previous state.

Alternatively, you can use git resetUndo rebaseas shown below.

$ git reset --hard ORIG_HEAD

ORIG_HEADHEADare created by commands that move your drastically , to record HEADthe position of before the operation, so that you can easily change the tip of your branch back to the state it was in before you ran them.

The caveat with this alternative is that no other operations like , , or should be performed after ORIG_HEADthe unwanted that may change the viz .rebaseresetrebasemerge

Therefore, we can undo the unwanted branches on Git through these methods rebase.