How to remove specific commits from Git? [duplicate]

Question

I want to remove few commits from my remote repository. I have few commits like this in my repo:

commits    messages

abcd123    some message
xyze456    another commit message
98y65r4    this commit is not required
987xcrt    this commit is not required
bl8976t    initial commit

I want to remove commit 98y65r4 and 987xcrt from my repo. How to achieve it?

Answer 1

There are two alternatives to this: the safe one that leaves you with a dirty git history, or the unsafe one that leaves you with a clean git history. You pick:

Option 1: Revert

You can tell git to "Revert a commit". This means it will introduce a change that reverts each change you made in a commit. You would need to execute it twice (once per commit):

git revert 98y65r4
git revert 987xcrt

This solution will leave your git history like this (you can execute gitk --all to see a graphical representation of the state of your repo):

2222222    revert of 987xcrt: this commit is not required
1111111    revert of 98y65r4: this commit is not required
abcd123    some message
xyze456    another commit message
98y65r4    this commit is not required
987xcrt    this commit is not required
bl8976t    initial commit

Then you can push the new 2 commits to your remote repo:

git push

This solution is safe because it does not make destructive operations on your remote repo.

Option 2: Interactive rebase

You also can use an interactive rebase for that. The command is:

git rebase -i bl8976t

In it, you are telling git to let you select which commits you want to mix together, reorder or remove.

When you execute the command an editor will open with a text similar to this:

pick    bl8976t    initial commit
pick    987xcrt    this commit is not required
pick    98y65r4    this commit is not required
pick    xyze456    another commit message
pick    abcd123    some message

Just go on and delete the lines you don't want, like this:

pick    bl8976t    initial commit
pick    xyze456    another commit message
pick    abcd123    some message

Save the file and close the editor.

So far, this has only modified the local copy of your repository (you can see the tree of commits with gitk --all).

Now you need to push your changes to your repo, which is done with a "push force", but before you execute the command bear in mind that push force is a destructive operation, it will overwrite the history of your remote repository and can cause merge troubles to other people working on it. If you are ok and want to do the push force, the command is:

git push -f