How to remove a commit from the middle of a branch

Question

I've made some commits and have pushed it to my remote repo. One of those I want to remove. It includes only one binary file, which was changed only in that commit in that branch. How to remove it without harm for later commits?

Answer 1

You can use interactive (-i) rebase to remove a previous commit.

$ git log                          # copy the target commit 

$ git rebase -i <target-commit>~1  # start rebase from the previous commit of target commit

An editor will open with a list of commits, one per line. Each of these lines begins with pick. Comment out your target commit's line (Put # at the start of target commit line).

OR, put drop or d instead of commenting out the line with #.

$ git rebase --continue      # repeat the command until finish rebase

Now, you need to do force (-f) push to remote since git history has been changed!

$ git push -f origin HEAD 

Answer 2

The flag --rebase-merges should be considered in answer, becasuse accepted solution will remove merge commit between HEAD and target commit~1

Example:

Before any rebase:

f3e07b4 (HEAD -> dev, origin/dev) headCommit
dd3d182 Merged PR 425: added playoutServerUsage
7ed3eb5 added playoutServerUsage
03b52af feat: add Description Series  #targetCommit
0a1217c some_older_commit

git rebase -i target-commit~1

c11fa07 (HEAD -> dev) headCommit
7ed3eb5 added playoutServerUsage
0a1217c some_older_commit

git rebase -i target-commit~1 --rebase-merge

a1943b6 (HEAD -> dev) headCommit
12411a1 Merged PR 425: added playoutServerUsage
7ed3eb5 added playoutServerUsage
0a1217c some_older_commit

Rebase with flag --rebase-merges can be harder and whole process will bo longer (bigger tree), but still we have to locate target commit and change 'pick' to 'drop'

After that I would recommend using

git push --force-with-lease origin HEAD 

instead force only.

force vs force-with-lease

PS. It is worth paying attention which commit hashes was changed