Revert to a commit by a SHA hash in Git? [duplicate]

I'm not clear on how git revert works. For example, I want to revert to a commit six commits behind the head, reverting all the changes in the intermediary commits in between.

Say its SHA hash is 56e05fced214c44a37759efa2dfc25a65d8ae98d. Then why can't I just do something like:

git revert 56e05fced214c44a37759efa2dfc25a65d8ae98d

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9 Answers

If you want to commit on top of the current HEAD with the exact state at a different commit, undoing all the intermediate commits, then you can use reset to create the correct state of the index to make the commit.

# Reset the index and working tree to the desired tree
# Ensure you have no uncommitted changes that you want to keep
git reset --hard 56e05fced
# Move the branch pointer back to the previous HEAD
git reset --soft "HEAD@{1}"
git commit -m "Revert to 56e05fced"

14

What git-revert does is create a commit which undoes changes made in a given commit, creating a commit which is reverse (well, reciprocal) of a given commit. Therefore

git revert <SHA-1>

should and does work.

If you want to rewind back to a specified commit, and you can do this because this part of history was not yet published, you need to use git-reset, not git-revert:

git reset --hard <SHA-1>

(Note that --hard would make you lose any non-committed changes in the working directory).

Additional Notes

By the way, perhaps it is not obvious, but everywhere where documentation says <commit> or <commit-ish> (or <object>), you can put an SHA-1 identifier (full or shortened) of commit.

2

It reverts the said commit, that is, adds the commit opposite to it. If you want to checkout an earlier revision, you do:

git checkout 56e05fced214c44a37759efa2dfc25a65d8ae98d

4

The best way to rollback to a specific commit is:

git reset --hard <commit-id>

Then:

git push <reponame> -f

5

If your changes have already been pushed to a public, shared remote, and you want to revert all commits between HEAD and <sha-id>, then you can pass a commit range to git revert,

git revert 56e05f..HEAD

and it will revert all commits between 56e05f and HEAD (excluding the start point of the range, 56e05f).

5

Updated:

If there were no merge commits in between, this answer provides a is simpler method:

But if there was one or more merge commits, that answer won't work, so stick to this one (that works in all cases).

Original answer:

# Create a backup of master branch
git branch backup_master
# Point master to '56e05fce' and
# make working directory the same with '56e05fce'
git reset --hard 56e05fce
# Point master back to 'backup_master' and
# leave working directory the same with '56e05fce'.
git reset --soft backup_master
# Now working directory is the same '56e05fce' and
# master points to the original revision. Then we create a commit.
git commit -a -m "Revert to 56e05fce"
# Delete unused branch
git branch -d backup_master

The two commands git reset --hard and git reset --soft are magic here. The first one changes the working directory, but it also changes head (the current branch) too. We fix the head by the second one.

6

This is more understandable:

git checkout 56e05fced -- .
git add .
git commit -m 'Revert to 56e05fced'

And to prove that it worked:

git diff 56e05fced

5

Should be as simple as:

git reset --hard 56e05f

That'll get you back to that specific point in time.

1

This might work:

git checkout 56e05f
echo ref: refs/heads/master > .git/HEAD
git commit

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