Reverting multiple commits and merges back to a specific commit without force pushing

Question

The Problem:

• Remote Repository with ~50 commits that should be reverted back to 1 specific commit (like a git reset --hard "my specific commit")
• commits AND merges in remote
• no force pushing at all

I know I could do git revert -n "my specific commit"..HEAD the problem with that is that it stops at the first merge. passing -m 1 would fix that, but then it stops at non merges.

git reset --hard and force pushing is NOT an option. I can't force push on this git host.

The Situation: (why would I need this)

• Bad changes in master, so we checkout a new branch and want to build a new build from an old state (from "specific commit") so we can then deploy that build to prod.
• Individual commits are easy to revert but bulk reverting is time consuming, at best I would want to revert lots of commits at once

I know there are lot's of issues around this on here, but I haven't found one with this exact problem and a reasonable solution without force pushing.

Answer 1

git reset --hard good_commit_hash
git reset --soft current_commit_hash
git commit

will do what you want.

(You can simply use "@{u}" as "current_commit_hash" if the upstream (remote) branch is the place where you want to commit on.)

Short: if you want to do any kind of cleanup in your repository, use git reset. It's kind of swiss army knife.