How can I go about rolling back to a specific commit in git?
The best answer someone could give me was to use git revert X times until I reach the desired commit.
So let's say I want to revert back to a commit that's 20 commits old, I'd have to run it 20 times.
Is there an easier way to do this?
I can't use reset because this repository is public.
Try this:
git checkout [revision] .
where [revision] is the commit hash (for example: 12345678901234567890123456789012345678ab).
Don't forget the . at the end, very important. This will apply changes to the whole tree. You should execute this command in the git project root. If you are in any sub directory, then this command only changes the files in the current directory. Then commit and you should be good.
You can undo this by
git reset --hard
that will delete all modifications from the working directory and staging area.
Well, I guess the question is, what do you mean by 'roll back'? If you can't reset because it's public and you want to keep the commit history intact, do you mean you just want your working copy to reflect a specific commit? Use git checkout and the commit hash.
Edit: As was pointed out in the comments, using git checkout without specifying a branch will leave you in a "no branch" state. Use git checkout <commit> -b <branchname> to checkout into a branch, or git checkout <commit> . to checkout into the current branch.
If you wish to rollback X time to a certain commit with a DETACHED HEAD (meaning you can't mess up anything), then by all means, use the following:
(replace X with how many commits you wish to go back)
git checkout HEAD~X
I.E. to go back one commit:
git checkout HEAD~1
Let's say you work on a project and after a day or so. You notice one feature is still giving you errors. But you do not know what change you made that caused the error. So you have to fish previous working commits. To revert to a specific commit:
git checkout 8a0fe5191b7dfc6a81833bfb61220d7204e6b0a9 .
Ok, so that commit works for you. No more error. You pinpointed the issue. Now you can go back to latest commit:
git checkout 792d9294f652d753514dc2033a04d742decb82a5 .
And checkout a specific file before it caused the error (in my case I use example Gemfile.lock):
git checkout 8a0fe5191b7dfc6a81833bfb61220d7204e6b0a9 -- /projects/myproject/Gemfile.lock
And this is one way to handle errors you created in commits without realizing the errors until later.
You can find the commit id related to each commit in the commits section of GitHub/BitBucket/Gitlab. Its very simple, suppose your commit id is 5889575 then if you want to go back to this part in your code then you simply need to type
git checkout 5889575 .
This will take you to that point of time in your code.
Here is an example to do that
cd /yourprojects/project-acme
git checkout efc11170c78 .