Remove a git commit between two commits

Question

I added some functionality in my project which took 4 git commits, now business is asking that the functionality is no more needed(After more than a month). So I need to remove those particular git commit(s) from my repo which now has 27 more commits after that.

Answer 1

There are four ways of doing so:

• Clean way, reverting but keep in log the revert:

  git revert --strategy resolve <commit>
  

• Harsh way, remove altogether only the last commit:

  git reset --soft "HEAD^"
  

• Rebase (show the log of the last 5 commits and delete the lines you don't want, or reorder, or squash multiple commits in one, or do anything else you want, this is a very versatile tool):

  git rebase -i HEAD~5
  

And if a mistake is done:

git rebase --abort

• Quick rebase: remove only a specific commit using its id:

  git rebase --onto commit-id^ commit-id
  

• Alternatives: you could also try:

  git cherry-pick commit-id
  

• Yet another alternative:

  git revert --no-commit
  

• As a last resort, if you need full freedom of history editing (eg, because git don't allow you to edit what you want to), you can use this very fast open source application: reposurgeon.

Note: of course, all these changes are done locally, you should git push afterwards to apply the changes to the remote. And in case your repo doesn't want to remove the commit ("no fast-forward allowed", which happens when you want to remove a commit you already pushed), you can use git push -f to force push the changes.

Note2: if working on a branch and you need to force push, you should absolutely avoid git push --force because this may overwrite other branches (if you have done changes in them, even if your current checkout is on another branch). Prefer to always specify the remote branch when you force push: git push --force origin your_branch.