Revert to a commit by a SHA hash in Git? [duplicat

Question

This question already has an answer here:

• How to revert a Git repository to a previous commit 39 answers

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

Answer 1

Updated:

This answer is simpler than my answer: How to revert Git repository to a previous commit?

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 too. We fix the head by the second one.

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

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"

Answer 4

This is more understandable:

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

And to prove that it worked:

git diff 56e05fced

Answer 5

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

Answer 6

The best way to rollback to a specific commit is:

git reset --hard <commit-id>

Then:

git push <reponame> -f