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
    How I Stopped WordPress Comment Spam

    I love almost every part of being a tech blogger:  learning, preaching, bantering, researching.  The one part about blogging that I absolutely loathe:  dealing with SPAM comments.  For the past two years, my blog has registered 8,000+ SPAM comments per day.  PER DAY.  Bloating my database...

  • By
    CSS vs. JS Animation: Which is Faster?

    How is it possible that JavaScript-based animation has secretly always been as fast — or faster — than CSS transitions? And, how is it possible that Adobe and Google consistently release media-rich mobile sites that rival the performance of native apps? This article serves as a point-by-point...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Creating Spacers with Flexbox

    I was one of the biggest fans of flexbox before it hit but, due to being shuffled around at Mozilla, I never had the chance to use it in any practice project; thus, flexbox still seems like a bit of a mystery to me.  This greatly...

  • By
    MooTools FontChecker Plugin

    There's a very interesting piece of code on Google Code called FontAvailable which does a jQuery-based JavaScript check on a string to check whether or not your system has a specific font based upon its output width. I've ported this functionality to MooTools. The MooTools...

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!