Undoing a 'git push'

Question

Here's what I did on my supposed-to-be-stable branch...

% git rebase master
First, rewinding head to replay your work on top of it...
Fast-forwarded alpha-0.3.0 to master.
% git status
# On branch alpha-0.3.0
# Your branch is ahead of 'origin/alpha-0.3.0' by 53 commits.
#
nothing to commit (working directory clean)
% git push
Fetching remote heads...
  refs/
  refs/heads/
  refs/tags/
  refs/remotes/
'refs/heads/master': up-to-date
updating 'refs/heads/alpha-0.3.0'
  from cc4b63bebb6e6dd04407f8788938244b78c50285
  to   83c9191dea88d146400853af5eb7555f252001b0
    done
'refs/heads/unstable': up-to-date
Updating remote server info

That was all a mistake as I later realized. I'd like to undo this entire process, and revert the alpha-0.3.0 branch back to what it was.

What should I do?

Answer 1

I believe that you can also do this:

git checkout alpha-0.3.0 git reset --hard cc4b63bebb6 git push origin +alpha-0.3.0 

This is very similar to the last method, except you don't have to muck around in the remote repo.

Answer 2

You need to make sure that no other users of this repository are fetching the incorrect changes or trying to build on top of the commits that you want removed because you are about to rewind history.

Then you need to 'force' push the old reference.

git push -f origin last_known_good_commit:branch_name 

or in your case

git push -f origin cc4b63bebb6:alpha-0.3.0 

You may have receive.denyNonFastForwards set on the remote repository. If this is the case, then you will get an error which includes the phrase [remote rejected].

In this scenario, you will have to delete and recreate the branch.

git push origin :alpha-0.3.0 git push origin cc4b63bebb6:refs/heads/alpha-0.3.0 

If this doesn't work - perhaps because you have receive.denyDeletes set, then you have to have direct access to the repository. In the remote repository, you then have to do something like the following plumbing command.

git update-ref refs/heads/alpha-0.3.0 cc4b63bebb6 83c9191dea8 

Answer 3

git revert is less dangerous than some of the approaches suggested here:

prompt> git revert 35f6af6f77f116ef922e3d75bc80a4a466f92650
[master 71738a9] Revert "Issue #482 - Fixed bug."
 4 files changed, 30 insertions(+), 42 deletions(-)
prompt> git status
# On branch master
# Your branch is ahead of 'origin/master' by 1 commit.
#
nothing to commit (working directory clean)
prompt>

Replace 35f6af6f77f116ef922e3d75bc80a4a466f92650 with your own commit.

Answer 4

A way to do it without losing the changes you wanted:

git reset cc4b63b 
git stash
git push -f origin alpha-0.3.0
git stash pop

Then you can choose the files you meant to push

Answer 5

The accepted solution (from @charles bailey) is highly dangerous if you are working in a shared repo.

As a best practice, all commits pushed to a remote repo that is shared should be considered 'immutable'. Use 'git revert' instead: http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/user-manual.html#fixing-mistakes

https://git-scm.com/book/be/v2/Git-Basics-Undoing-Things

Answer 6

git push origin +7f6d03:master

This will revert your repo to mentioned commit number

Answer 7

Another way to do this:

1. create another branch
2. checkout the previous commit on that branch using "git checkout"
3. push the new branch.
4. delete the old branch & push the delete (use git push origin --delete <branch_name>)
5. rename the new branch into the old branch
6. push again.

Answer 8

git reset --hard HEAD^
git push origin -f

This will remove the last commit from your local device as well as Github

Answer 9

Scenario 1: If you want to undo the last commit say 8123b7e04b3, below is the command(this worked for me):

git push origin +8123b7e04b3^:<branch_name>

Output looks like below:

Total 0 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)
To https://testlocation/code.git
 + 8123b7e...92bc500 8123b7e04b3^ -> master (forced update)

Note: To update the change to your local code (to remove the commit locally as well) :

$ git reset --hard origin/<branchName>
Message displayed is :    HEAD is now at 8a3902a comments_entered_for_commit

Additional info: Scenario 2: In some situation, you may want to revert back what you just undo'ed (basically undo the undo) through the previous command, then use the below command:

git reset --hard 8123b7e04b3
git push

Output:

HEAD is now at cc6206c Comment_that_was_entered_for_commit

More info here: https://github.com/blog/2019-how-to-undo-almost-anything-with-git

Answer 10

Undo multiple commits git reset --hard 0ad5a7a6 (Just provide commit SHA1 hash)

Undo last commit

git reset --hard HEAD~1 (changes to last commit will be removed ) git reset --soft HEAD~1 (changes to last commit will be available as uncommited local modifications)