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Rolling Back to a Previous Git Commit

Using Git Reset

Rolling back to a previous commit

To roll back a git commit, use git reset with the either the --soft or --hard flag.

  • --soft: Does not discard the changes made, leaves them in the staging area.
  • --hard: Discards the changes made and removes them from the staging area.
    • NOTE: This permanently deletes your changes. Make sure you have a backup of your work before using this flag.
git reset --soft HEAD~1  # Rolls back to the previous commit, leaves changes in the staging area
  • git reset: Resets the current HEAD to a specific commit or state.
    • The HEAD~1 specifies the current commit, minus one (the last commit).
      • This can also be a commit hash.
    • --hard discards the changes of the commit specified by {commit_hash}.
    • --soft will keep the changes of the commit specified by {commit_hash}.
      • This leaves the changes as uncommitted changes.

Before doing a reset, especially a hard reset, it's a good idea to ensure that you don't have any uncommitted changes that you want to keep.

You can check this with git status.

If you've already pushed the commit to a remote repository and you perform a reset, you'll have to force push (git push --force) to update the remote repository.

  • Be careful with this, as it can overwrite history on the remote and can impact others who have pulled the changes.

Fast Forwarding to HEAD

If you go back to a previous commit, using reset or something else, use git merge to get back to the HEAD of the branch. 

git merge origin/main