Git can be challenging for new users, often leading to confusion and accidental mistakes in a repository. This guide provides essential commands to help you troubleshoot errors and efficiently recover from common Git mishaps.
To get back stuff that you accidentally removed or to get back to a pervious version before you made some changes that broke your code. Or to recover a merge you didn't want:
git reflog
# You will see a list of everything you've done in git, across all
branches!
# Each one has an index HEAD@{index}.
# Find the one before you broke everything.
git reset HEAD@{index}
# Magic time machine
If you already commited and then realised that you missed a change you wanted to include in that commit, you can make the changes to the file and then run the following commands:
# make your changes
git add {file}
git commit --amend --no-edit
# now your last commit contains that change!
# WARNING: never amend public commits
# Instead of creating a new commit, this modifies the most recent
commit to include your new changes.
You accidentally commited something to main but you wanted it instead in a new branch
# create a new branch from the current state of master
git branch new-branch-name
# remove the last commit from the master branch
git reset HEAD~ --hard
git checkout new-branch-name
# your commit lives in this branch now
You want to move a commit from a branch to another
# check the commit history of the branch where the commit is located
git log [branch-name]
# switch to the target branch
git checkout [name-of-the-correct-branch]
Cherry-pick the commit
git cherry-pick
# switch back to the original branch
git checkout [original-branch-name]
# remove the commit
git reset --hard [commit-hash-before-the-cherry-picked-commit]
You want to undo a commit from like 5 commits ago
# find the commit you need to undo
git log
# once you've found your commit, save the hash
git revert [saved hash]
# git will create a new commit that undoes that commit
You really messed up the repository and you want to get the version that is found remotely
cd ..
sudo rm -r stupid-git-repo-dir
git clone https://some.github.url/stupid-git-repo-dir.git
cd stupid-git-repo-dir