How to delete the last n commits on Github and locally?

Question

I'm trying to delete the last 2 commits from one of my GitHub repositories. I've tried as suggested here : git push -f origin HEAD^^:master. It seems that it works, as the last two commits are removed.

Then I deleted them from my local repository with git rebase -i HEAD~2. I remove the lines that are related to those commits, and check with git log that they are correctly removed.

After that, I make some changes in my local repository, make a new commit, and push to GitHub. The problem is that, in my GitHub account, I have the previous two commits that I've tried to delete.

I think the problem is in my local repository, because if I clone my Github repository to my local and make some changes here, when I push a new commit those old commits aren't pushed to GitHub.

Answer 1

To remove the last two commits locally I'd suggest using:

git reset --hard HEAD^^

Rebase is a completely different operation that won't help you here.

Answer 2

If you want to remove the 2 (two) last commits, there is an easy command to do that:

git reset --hard HEAD~2

You can change the 2 for any number of last commits you want to remove.

And to push this change to remote, you need to do a git push with the force (-f) parameter:

git push -f

However, I don't recommend to do any git command with -f or --hard options involved if there are new commits on remote (Github) after this commits that you want to remove. In that case, always use git revert.

Answer 3

The following works for me

git reset HEAD~n

It removes the last n commits from local repo, as HEAD^ removes only one. If you need to remove these changes from remote, you might need to force push as you will be behind remote.

git push -f origin <branch>