Git Undo Last Commit

By  on  

I'm a massive fan of git; it's super powerful and easy to use, especially when it comes to branching.  The biggest sin I commit when using git is adding files and then committing them...to master branch instead of a feature branch.  Oops.  Certainly don't want that.

If you've done a git add (files) and then commit them to the wrong branch, backing that out is easy:

git reset --soft HEAD~1

With the command above, the files are still added but not committed, so you can create your feature branch, do another git commit -m (message), and be on your way!

Recent Features

  • By
    9 Mind-Blowing WebGL Demos

    As much as developers now loathe Flash, we're still playing a bit of catch up to natively duplicate the animation capabilities that Adobe's old technology provided us.  Of course we have canvas, an awesome technology, one which I highlighted 9 mind-blowing demos.  Another technology available...

  • By
    Creating Scrolling Parallax Effects with CSS

    Introduction For quite a long time now websites with the so called "parallax" effect have been really popular. In case you have not heard of this effect, it basically includes different layers of images that are moving in different directions or with different speed. This leads to a...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    HTML5’s window.postMessage API

    One of the little known HTML5 APIs is the window.postMessage API.  window.postMessage allows for sending data messages between two windows/frames across domains.  Essentially window.postMessage acts as cross-domain AJAX without the server shims. Let's take a look at how window.postMessage works and how you...

  • By
    Implementing Basic and Fancy Show/Hide in MooTools 1.2

    One of the great parts of MooTools is that the library itself allows for maximum flexibility within its provided classes. You can see evidence of this in the "Class" class' implement method. Using the implement method, you can add your own methods to...

Discussion

  1. Yuriy Husnay

    The other way to achieve this, is

    git reset --soft HEAD^
    

    as HEAD^ is pointer to HEAD~1

    Personally, I have an alias git undo which is:

    git config --global alias.undo 'reset --soft HEAD^'
    
  2. MaxArt

    Git “easy to use”… Uh, what?
    It’s a very complete and powerful tool, no doubt about it, but I wouldn’t call it “easy”. There’s a plethora of options and unclear docs, that it takes a lot of time just to know they exist, not to mention actually use them and get used to them.
    For example, I knew about this trick, but didn’t know about Yuriy’s suggestion.

    That’s why I end up using a tool like SourceTree instead.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!