Accidental Git Commit

In the fervor of making some sweet changes to your repository you might accidentally commit changes before you were actually ready to. First, breathe, you can fix this; for real. Second, remember you aren’t the first person who completely broke everything with a commit, heck, even the GitHub Trainers do it from time to time. So, now that you have found yourself in some :ahem: very distinguished company, you can fix that gross commit.

Keep in mind, all exercises expect you to have run the script to create files using the scripts found on the Set Up Your Environment page.

I didn't push

If you didn’t push that incomplete commit up to your remote, it makes it a little bit easier to resolve this misstep.

  1. Ensure you are on the correct branch and enter: git log --oneline.
  2. We are going to assume you didn’t mean to commit file 6, so identify the SHA-1 hash for the adding file 5 commit.
  3. Enter: git reset --mixed SHA-1, where SHA-1 is the SHA-1 hash associated with the adding file 5 commit.
  4. Enter: git status. You should see file6.md in your working directory.

Now you are ready to keep making your changes and no one is the wiser! :guitar:

I pushed

Since we accidentally pushed our changes to the remote, you need to revert the commit (or commits) to prevent them creating any problems for other collaborators.

  1. Ensure you are on the correct branch and enter: git log --oneline.
  2. Identify the SHA-1 hash for the incorrect commit. For this example, let’s use the adding file 4 commit.
  3. Enter: git revert SHA-1, where SHA-1 is the SHA-1 hash for the commit where you created file 4.
  4. Enter a commit message (or simply keep the predefined revert message) and close the editor.
  5. Enter: git push. You have successfully undone the commit you recently pushed to your remote.

Recovering Your Work

Now that the branch on the remote is fixed, you may want to recover that accidental commit and finish your work. Here’s how you can do it:

  1. Use git log --oneline to identify the SHA-1 of the revert commit. If you left the default message, it will say something like Revert "adding file 4".
  2. Type git revert SHA-1 where the SHA-1 is the revert commit.
  3. Finish your work on the files.
  4. Type: git add to stage your changes.
  5. Type: git commit --amend to meld your changes into the previous commit.
  6. Enter an appropriate commit message and close your text editor.
  7. Enter: git push to send your beautiful (and complete) new commit to the remote.
Tell me why

Revert

The easiest way to think about revert is just making your repository do the exact opposite of an existing commit and creating a new commit to record that change. Revert is useful when trying to ‘undo’ the changes made in a specific commit, and even more useful if you pushed a change that your want to reverse to your remote since it will always create a new commit and leave the original commit untouched.

Reset

For more information on git reset, check out the ‘Tell me why’ section in the Too Many (small) Commits scenario.

Commit –amend

For more information on git commit --amend, check out the ‘Tell me why’ section in the Commit Message Sucks scenario.

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