Throw away local commits in Git

Question

Due to some bad cherry-picking, my local Git repository is currently five commits ahead of the origin, and not in a good state. I want to get rid of all these commits and start over again.

Obviously, deleting my working directory and re-cloning would do it, but downloading everything from GitHub again seems like overkill, and not a good use of my time.

Maybe git revert is what I need, but I don't want to end up 10 commits ahead of the origin (or even six), even if it does get the code itself back to the right state. I just want to pretend the last half-hour never happened.

Is there a simple command that will do this? It seems like an obvious use case, but I'm not finding any examples of it.

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Note that this question is specifically about commits, not about:

• untracked files
• unstaged changes
• staged, but uncommitted changes

Answer 1

If your excess commits are only visible to you, you can just do git reset --hard origin/<branch_name> to move back to where the origin is. This will reset the state of the repository to the previous commit, and it will discard all local changes.

Doing a git revert makes new commits to remove old commits in a way that keeps everyone's history sane.