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< Back to Nuggets

Git reset

First off: Have you already pushed your changes? If yes and you haven't pushed to your private fork, stop right here! Unless you really know it's ok to rewrite history.

Normal reset

Let's start with the regular git reset and go back one commit as an example:

git reset HEAD~1
# make your changes
git add ...
git commit -c ORIG_HEAD

What we did:

  • git reset moves the HEAD pointer to a specified point
  • HEAD~1 specifies this point as the previous command to the current HEAD reference
  • At this point, it looks like the previous commit never existed
  • git commit -c ORIG_HEAD re-commits the "lost" commit

git reset --soft

The --soft option takes one more step, than only moving the HEAD reference back by one. It also adds the changes which were made in the commit we just undid, to the staging area (INDEX). When you execute git status after the soft reset, you'll see green the changes that were made by the commit and red the changes made after you commited.

git reset --hard

--hard takes even one more step. After moving the commit changes to the staging area like --soft does, it also undoes any changes to the working tree. So anything you did after the commit, will be lost.

Bonus: Change latest commit message

If you only want to change the commit message of the latest commit, there's no need for a reset and you can simply use the --amend option.

git commit --amend
# or directly
git commit --amend -m "<new-message>"

Beyond reset

If you want to go more aggressive and rewrite the history, check out Advanced rebasing.