Remove a git commit which has not been pushed

Question

I did a git commit but I have not pushed it to the repository yet. So when I do git status, I get '# Your branch is ahead of 'master' by 1 commit.

So if I want to roll back my top commit, can I just do:

git reset --hard eb27bf26dd18c5a34e0e82b929e0d74cfcaab316 

given that when I do git log I get:

 commit eb27bf26dd18c5a34e0e82b929e0d74cfcaab316 Date:   Tue Sep 29 11:21:41 2009 -0700   commit db0c078d5286b837532ff5e276dcf91885df2296 Date:   Tue Sep 22 10:31:37 2009 -0700

Answer 1

IF you have NOT pushed your changes to remote

git reset HEAD~1 

Check if the working copy is clean by git status.

ELSE you have pushed your changes to remote

git revert HEAD 

This command will revert/remove the local commits/change and then you can push

Answer 2

Actually, when you use git reset, you should refer to the commit that you are resetting to; so you would want the db0c078 commit, probably.

An easier version would be git reset --hard HEAD^, to reset to the previous commit before the current head; that way you don't have to be copying around commit IDs.

Beware when you do any git reset --hard, as you can lose any uncommitted changes you have. You might want to check git status to make sure your working copy is clean, or that you do want to blow away any changes that are there.

In addition, instead of HEAD you can use origin/master as reference, as suggested by @bdonlan in the comments: git reset --hard origin/master