Throw away local commits in Git

Question

Due to some bad cherry-picking, my local Git repository is currently five commits ahead of the origin, and not in a good state. I want to get rid of all these commits and start over again.

Obviously, deleting my working directory and re-cloning would do it, but downloading everything from GitHub again seems like overkill, and not a good use of my time.

Maybe git revert is what I need, but I don't want to end up 10 commits ahead of the origin (or even six), even if it does get the code itself back to the right state. I just want to pretend the last half-hour never happened.

Is there a simple command that will do this? It seems like an obvious use case, but I'm not finding any examples of it.

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Note that this question is specifically about commits, not about:

• untracked files
• unstaged changes
• staged, but uncommitted changes

Answer 1

If your excess commits are only visible to you, you can just do git reset --hard origin/<branch_name> to move back to where the origin is. This will reset the state of the repository to the previous commit, and it will discard all local changes.

Doing a git revert makes new commits to remove old commits in a way that keeps everyone's history sane.

Answer 2

Simply delete your local master branch and recreate it like so:

git branch -D master
git checkout origin/master -b master

Answer 3

Try:

git reset --hard <the sha1 hash>

to reset your head to wherever you want to be. Use gitk to see which commit you want to be at. You can do reset within gitk as well.

Answer 4

Delete the most recent commit:

git reset --hard HEAD~1

Delete the most recent commit, without destroying the work you've done:

git reset --soft HEAD~1

Answer 5

On your branch attempt:

git reset --hard origin/<branch_name>

Validate the reversal (to the state, with no local commits), using "git log" or "git status" hence.

Answer 6

If you are using Atlassian SourceTree app, you could use the reset option in the context menu.

Answer 7

git reset --hard @{u}* deletes all your local changes on the current branch, including commits. I'm surprised no one has posted this yet considering you won't have to look up what commit to revert to or play with branches.

_{* That is, reset to the current branch at @{upstream}—commonly origin/<branchname>, but not always}

Answer 8

Simple Solution will be to match local master branch HEAD to origin/master branch HEAD

git reset --hard origin/master

PS: origin/master - is remote pointer to master branch. You can replace master with any branch name

Answer 9

Before answering let's add some background, explaining what is this HEAD. since some of the options below will result in detached head

First of all what is HEAD?

HEAD is simply a reference to the current commit (latest) on the current branch.
There can only be a single HEAD at any given time. (excluding git worktree)

The content of HEAD is stored inside .git/HEAD and it contains the 40 bytes SHA-1 of the current commit.

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detached HEAD

If you are not on the latest commit - meaning that HEAD is pointing to a prior commit in history its called detached HEAD.

On the command line, it will look like this- SHA-1 instead of the branch name since the HEAD is not pointing to the tip of the current branch

A few options on how to recover from a detached HEAD:

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git checkout

git checkout <commit_id>
git checkout -b <new branch> <commit_id>
git checkout HEAD~X // x is the number of commits t go back

This will checkout new branch pointing to the desired commit.
This command will checkout to a given commit.
At this point, you can create a branch and start to work from this point on.

# Checkout a given commit. 
# Doing so will result in a `detached HEAD` which mean that the `HEAD`
# is not pointing to the latest so you will need to checkout branch
# in order to be able to update the code.
git checkout <commit-id>

# create a new branch forked to the given commit
git checkout -b <branch name>

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git reflog

You can always use the reflog as well.
git reflog will display any change which updated the HEAD and checking out the desired reflog entry will set the HEAD back to this commit.

Every time the HEAD is modified there will be a new entry in the reflog

git reflog
git checkout HEAD@{...}

This will get you back to your desired commit

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git reset --hard <commit_id>

"Move" your HEAD back to the desired commit.

# This will destroy any local modifications.
# Don't do it if you have uncommitted work you want to keep.
git reset --hard 0d1d7fc32

# Alternatively, if there's work to keep:
git stash
git reset --hard 0d1d7fc32
git stash pop
# This saves the modifications, then reapplies that patch after resetting.
# You could get merge conflicts if you've modified things which were
# changed since the commit you reset to.

• Note: (Since Git 2.7)
  you can also use the git rebase --no-autostash as well.

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git revert <sha-1>

"Undo" the given commit or commit range.
The reset command will "undo" any changes made in the given commit.
A new commit with the undo patch will be committed while the original commit will remain in the history as well.

# add new commit with the undo of the original one.
# the <sha-1> can be any commit(s) or commit range
git revert <sha-1>

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This schema illustrates which command does what.
As you can see there reset && checkout modify the HEAD.

Answer 10

To see/get the SHA-1 id of the commit you want to come back too

gitk --all

To roll back to that commit

git reset --hard sha1_id

!Note. All the commits that were made after that commit will be deleted (and all your modification to the project). So first better clone the project to another branch or copy to another directory.

Answer 11

I had a situation where I wanted to remove a commit that wasn't pushed, but the commit was before another one. To do so, I've used the following command

git rebase -i HEAD~2 -> it will rebase the last two commits

And I used 'drop' for the commit signature that I wanted to remove.

Answer 12

Remove untracked files (uncommitted local changes)

git clean -df

Permanently deleting all local commits and get latest remote commit

git reset --hard origin/<branch_name>

Answer 13

If Your branch is ahead of 'origin/XXX' by 5 commits.

You can issue:

git reset --hard HEAD~5

And it should remove the last 5 commits.

Answer 14

Use any number of times, to revert back to the last commit without deleting any files that you have recently created.

git reset --soft HEAD~1

Then use

git reset HEAD <name-of-file/files*>

to unstage, or untrack.

Answer 15

For local commits which are not being pushed, you can also use git rebase -i to delete or squash a commit.

Answer 16

For those interested in the Visual Studio solution, here is the drill:

1. In the Team Explorer window, connect to the target repo.
2. Then from Branches, right-click the branch of interest and select View history.
3. Right-click a commit in the History window and choose Reset -> Delete changes (--hard).

That will throw away your local commits and reset the state of your repo to the selected commit. I.e. Your changes after you pulled the repo will be lost.

Answer 17

If you just want to throw away local commits and keep the modifications done in files then do
git reset @~
Other answers addressed the hard reset

Answer 18

Find the sha1 for the commit you want to revert to:

za$ git reflog
... snip ...
cf42fa2... HEAD@{0}: commit: fixed misc bugs
~
~
cf42fa2... HEAD@{84}: commit: fixed params for .....
73b9363... HEAD@{85}: commit: Don't symlink to themes on deployment.
547cc1b... HEAD@{86}: commit: Deploy to effectif.com web server.
1dc3298... HEAD@{87}: commit: Updated the theme.
18c3f51... HEAD@{88}: commit: Verify with Google webmaster tools.
26fbb9c... HEAD@{89}: checkout: moving to effectif

And then use --mixed flag so that you "reset HEAD and index":

za$ git reset --mixed cf42fa2

Available flags:

za$ git reset -h

-q, --quiet           be quiet, only report errors
--mixed               reset HEAD and index
--soft                reset only HEAD
--hard                reset HEAD, index and working tree
--merge               reset HEAD, index and working tree
--keep                reset HEAD but keep local changes
--recurse-submodules[=<reset>]
                      control recursive updating of submodules
-p, --patch           select hunks interactively
-N, --intent-to-add

Answer 19

git reset --hard <SHA-Code>

This will come in handy if you have made some mistakes on your local copy that you want to make sure doesn't get pushed to your remote branch by mistake.

The SHA-Code can be obtained by looking at webVersion of your git dashboard for the last commit on the branch.

This way you can get synchronized with the last commit on the branch.

You can do git pull after you have successfully completed the hard reset to confirm nothing new to syn i.e. you get to see the message.

Your branch is up to date with Origin/<Branch Name>

Answer 20

If you get your local repo into a complete mess, then a reliable way to throw away local commits in Git is to...

1. Use "git config --get remote.origin.url" to get URL of remote origin
2. Rename local git folder to "my_broken_local_repo"
3. Use "git clone <url_from_1>" to get fresh local copy of remote git repository

In my experience Eclipse handles the world changing around it quite well. However, you may need to select affected projects in Eclipse and clean them to force Eclipse to rebuild them. I guess other IDEs may need a forced rebuild too.

A side benefit of the above procedure is that you will find out if your project relies on local files that were not put into git. If you find you are missing files then you can copy them in from "my_broken_local_repo" and add them to git. Once you have confidence that your new local repo has everything you need then you can delete "my_broken_local_repo".