I ran git status which told me everything was up to date and there were no local changes.
Then I made several consecutive changes and realized I wanted to throw everything away and get back to my original state. Will this command do it for me?
git reset --hard HEAD
To revert changes made to your working copy, do this:
git checkout .
Or equivalently, for git version >= 2.23:
git restore .
To revert changes made to the index (i.e., that you have added), do this. Warning this will reset all of your unpushed commits to master!:
git reset
To revert a change that you have committed:
git revert <commit 1> <commit 2>
To remove untracked files (e.g., new files, generated files):
git clean -f
Or untracked directories (e.g., new or automatically generated directories):
git clean -fd
Note: You may also want to run
git clean -fd
as
git reset --hard
will not remove untracked files, where as git-clean will remove any files from the tracked root directory that are not under git tracking. WARNING - BE CAREFUL WITH THIS! It is helpful to run a dry-run with git-clean first, to see what it will delete.
This is also especially useful when you get the error message
~"performing this command will cause an un-tracked file to be overwritten"
Which can occur when doing several things, one being updating a working copy when you and your friend have both added a new file of the same name, but he's committed it into source control first, and you don't care about deleting your untracked copy.
In this situation, doing a dry run will also help show you a list of files that would be overwritten.
Look into git-reflog. It will list all the states it remembers (default is 30 days), and you can simply checkout the one you want. For example:
$ git init > /dev/null
$ touch a
$ git add .
$ git commit -m"Add file a" > /dev/null
$ echo 'foo' >> a
$ git commit -a -m"Append foo to a" > /dev/null
$ for i in b c d e; do echo $i >>a; git commit -a -m"Append $i to a" ;done > /dev/null
$ git reset --hard HEAD^^ > /dev/null
$ cat a
foo
b
c
$ git reflog
145c322 HEAD@{0}: HEAD^^: updating HEAD
ae7c2b3 HEAD@{1}: commit: Append e to a
fdf2c5e HEAD@{2}: commit: Append d to a
145c322 HEAD@{3}: commit: Append c to a
363e22a HEAD@{4}: commit: Append b to a
fa26c43 HEAD@{5}: commit: Append foo to a
0a392a5 HEAD@{6}: commit (initial): Add file a
$ git reset --hard HEAD@{2}
HEAD is now at fdf2c5e Append d to a
$ cat a
foo
b
c
d
Try this if you are in top project directory:
git restore .
If not then use:
git restore :/
If you would like to revert local changes for a subset:
git restore :/git restore .git restore '*.c'For details see git restore documentation.
To remove untracked files: git clean -f
Adding another option here.
I'm referring to the title: Revert local changes.
It can also apply to changes that weren't staged for commit.
In this case you can use:
git restore <file>
To go back to previous state.
Two simple steps
git fetch origin
git reset --hard origin/master
or if your git uses main instead master use this:
git reset --hard origin/main
If you just want to delete all the changes, go for git checkout .
It's the faster and simpler one.
This question is more about broader repository reset / revert, but in case if you're interested in reverting individual change - I've added similar answer in here:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/60890371/2338477
Answers to questions:
How to revert individual change with or without change preserving in git history
How to return back to old version to restart from same state
The other answers seemed way too complicated, so here is a simple solution that worked for me:
# Execute on the root of the working tree...
# Discard all changes to tracked files
git checkout .
# Remove all untracked files
git clean -fd
Note: ignored files will remain unaffected