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

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Event Delegation with MooTools

    Events play a huge role in JavaScript. I can't name one website I've created in the past two years that hasn't used JavaScript event handling on some level. Ask yourself: how often do I inject elements into the DOM and not add an...

  • By
    MooTools, mediaboxAdvanced, and Mexico

    The lightbox is probably one of my favorite parts of the Web 2.0 revolution. No more having to open new windows (which can bog down your computer quite a bit) to see a larger image, video, etc. Instead, the item loads right into the...

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!