Before we begin, using git reset rewrites history. This means that you shouldn’t use it on any branches that other people might have copies of, i.e. branches that you have pushed.
Of course, this is a highly-recommended guideline, not a rule, and you can reset anything provided you know what you’re doing and have good communication with your team.
But if you never reset a branch you haven’t pushed, you won’t get into trouble.
So what is it?
Doing a reset allows you change where the HEAD and your current branch point to. You can move your current branch to a different commit!
When you move a branch to another commit, the branch “becomes” the repo at the point of that commit, including all the history that led up to that commit. The upshot is that all the commits that led to the old branch point are now effectively gone, as shown in Figure 18.1.
So be sure you mean it when you reset! You’ll be losing commits25!
When doing a reset, you can ask Git to move the current branch to another commit, or to another branch, or to anything else that identifies a commit.
Now, there is a question of what happens to the difference between your working tree at the old commit and whatever it would be at the new commit.
And there we have some options: soft reset, mixed reset, and hard reset.
And which you choose controls what happens to the branch, the stage, and the working tree.
Note: in the following examples, I’m going to use the term “old commit” to refer to where the branch was before the reset, and “new commit” to refer to where it will be after the reset.
With all three variants, the current branch moves to the new (specified) commit.
The summary of differences is:
When you run a git reset --soft, this resets the current branch to point to the given commit, and makes the stage and working tree both have the changes that were present in the old commit.
The upshot is that git status will show your old commit’s changes as staged, and none of the files as modified.
In other words, you’ll see the old state of your files on the stage ready to commit.
A common use for this might be to collapse some of your previous commits similar to what we did with rebase and squashing commits.
Let’s say we have commits like this (pretend the numbers are the commit hashes):
commit 555 (HEAD -> main)
Fixed another typo again
commit 444
Fixed another typo
commit 333
Fixed a typo
commit 222
Implemented feature
commit 111
AddedThat’s a gnarly-looking commit history. It would be nice to rewrite it (but if and only if you haven’t pushed it yet!).
We can do that with a soft reset back to commit 111.
If we do this soft reset:
$ git reset --soft 111 # Again, pretend 111 is the commit hashWe’ll then be in this point with all the other commits gone…
commit 111 (HEAD -> main)
AddedExcept importantly our files as they existed in commit 555 will now be staged and ready to commit. That means with the soft reset the changes weren’t lost, but effectively commits 222-555 are all squished together on the stage.
So we commit them:
$ git commit -m "Implemented feature"And now we’re here with a nice commit history:
commit 222 (HEAD -> main)
Implemented feature
commit 111
AddedAnd now, finally we can push, happy that our changes are presentable to the general public.
Again, we’ve rewritten history here. Don’t do this if you’ve already pushed those commits past the one you’re resetting to.
When you run a git reset --mixed26, this resets the current branch to point to the given commit, and it modifies the stage to that commit, and it doesn’t change your working tree.
The upshot is that it will show files as “modified” with the changes of the old commit, and there will be nothing on the stage.
Now, thinking about this, since the branch has moved to a commit with your files in one state, but your working tree has the files in another state, the files must be modified with respect to the commit the branch now points to.
And this is what happens. Your changes at the old commit will show up as modified files at the current commit.
It’s like the soft reset, except instead of the old commit ending up on the stage, it ends up in the working tree. You can stage it and commit it from here.
But that’s not all! Since the stage is also updated to the new commit, it means the stage is effectively emptied.
In fact, this is the classic use for a mixed reset: git reset HEAD. This moves files from staged state back to modified state.
In the glorious future past, a new command was introduced to do this:
git restore --staged. That’s the preferred method to use now.
This will reset the current branch to where it already was (assuming HEAD points to the current branch), and reset the stage to be the same as that commit. This unstages the files that were there. And it changes the working tree files to have the changes that were already present in those files at that point, which would be any changes you introduced.
And that unstages the files!
Another use might be if you want to squash a bunch of unpushed commits but simply don’t want to stage the changes at the old commit yet, leaving them as modified.
This resets everything to a particular commit. The branch moves there. The stage is set to that commit. The files in the working tree are set to that commit. All changes since that commit are lost.
Use this if you want to bail out. You’ve made some commits and decided that was the wrong way, and you want to just roll them back entirely.
Again, only do this if you haven’t pushed!
If you do a hard reset, it will simply move the branch and reset your entire world (as it pertains to that branch) to that point as if nothing had happened since. git status will report that everything is clean.
In the above examples, we’ve been resetting to a direct ancestor of our current commit. This is the common case for using git reset.
But there’s no reason why you couldn’t reset to an entirely different divergent branch. It just moves the branch there with exactly the same rules for soft, mixed, and hard that we’ve already covered.
So far, we’ve been just doing resets on a commit-by-commit basis. But we could also do mixed resets with specific files. We can’t do hard or soft resets with specific files, though—sorry!
For example, we can do a mixed reset to unstage a single file.
Let’s say we’re here:
$ git status
On branch main
Changes to be committed:
(use "git restore --staged <file>..." to unstage)
modified: bar.txt
modified: foo.txtAnd we want to reset foo.txt off the stage, but leave bar.txt on there.
Again, we’d use
git restore --stagedin these modern times. But we’re going to press on here for the sake of example.
So let’s specify just that file:
$ git reset foo.txt
Unstaged changes after reset:
M foo.txt
$ git status
On branch main
Changes to be committed:
(use "git restore --staged <file>..." to unstage)
modified: bar.txt
Changes not staged for commit:
(use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
(use "git restore <file>..." to discard changes in working
directory)
modified: foo.txtAnd there you have it.
Let’s say you’ve made a mess of things somehow and you have to reset a branch that you’ve already pushed commits on. That is, you have to rewrite a public history.
First: get good communication with the team. They’re going to make fun of you for sure, but at least they won’t hate you27.
Never do a forced push without completely understanding why you’re doing it. Git is trying to stop you from doing a push for a reason: your own good! Everyone else who has cloned the repo will very likely be impacted and they need to be informed. Everybody. We use it here to demonstrate when it is necessary.
Our process will be something like this:
Your coworkers will do something like this:
git fetch to get the new branch position from the remote.main branch, you would git reset --hard origin/main.Note that your coworkers don’t necessarily need to do a hard reset; they could do a mixed reset, for instance.
We have basically two options to use with git push here:
--force: Just push the new branch position, damn the torpedoes29.--force-with-lease: Only force push if the remote branch’s position is what we expect. In other words, don’t force push if someone else has pushed a new commit in the meantime. This is a good safety measure because no one should have pushed a new commit in the meantime since you’ve been in communication with your team about this. Right?If you try to --force-with-lease and someone else has pushed another commit to this branch in the meantime, you’ll be presented with an error:
$ git push --force-with-lease
To git@github.com:user/repo.git
! [rejected] main -> main (stale info)
error: failed to push some refs to 'git@github.com:user/repo.git'If that happens, you’ll have to talk to your team to get them to stop, and then pull the changes, make sure everyone is on board with the new reset, and then start again.
We’ll use --force-with-lease in our example.
First, let’s play the part of the person who is rewriting the public history.
The very first thing I’m going to do is coordinate with the team. If you’re already past this point, do it right now.
Then we’ll start the rewrite. We’ll be on the main branch for this demo. Let’s reset to an earlier commit, and we’ll assume that these commits we’re resetting past are already public and other team members already have them.
$ git reset --hard 4849e6
HEAD is now at 4849e65 added line 3So far no harm, but now we’re going to push this history change to our origin. And we’ll use --force-with-lease for safety.
$ git push --force-with-lease
To git@github.com:user/repo.git
+ a2b7ac3...ce44516 main -> main (forced update)Now we’ve publicly rewritten history. Tell the team, which you’ve been in contact with this entire time, that you’ve done so. And they can begin to fix up their clones with much grumbling.
You’ve just received word from your coworker that public history on the main branch has been rewritten and pushed to the remote, which we’ll assume is origin for this example.
First thing we should do is make sure we’re all backed up in whatever manner we need.
Perhaps a commit of the latest stuff:
$ git add [all files]
$ git commit -m "last commit before public reset"Or a stash if we’re not ready to commit:
$ git stashAnd perhaps make a new branch right here so we can revisit the old state of affairs for reference if we have to:
$ git branch oldmainAnd now it’s time for action. We need to fetch the new branch information.
$ git fetch origin
From git@github.com:user/repo.git
+ e7b133a...521a873 main -> origin/main (forced update)We just fetched, so our clone doesn’t look different to us yet. But let’s put an end to that and get on the same page as origin. This involves resetting our local main to be the same as it is on the remote tracking branch origin/main. (Remember the latter has been force pushed to a different commit, and we want our main to point to that commit, as well.)
Assuming we’re on branch main right now:
$ git reset --hard origin/mainAnd now we’re on the same page as origin.
If we had stashed things, let’s try to get them back, resolving any conflicts as per usual:
$ git stash popAnd if you want to refer to any old commits and you set up the oldmain branch as above, you can git switch oldmain to examine them, and maybe use something like git cherry-pick to bring in any functionality you need.
HEADUsing the reset feature moves the HEAD around by necessity. What if you just want to move a branch to another commit but leave HEAD alone?
It can be done! But you can’t do it with a branch you have checked out right now. So either detach the head or attach it to a different branch.
Instead of using git reset to do this, we’ll use git branch. Here’s an example:
$ git switch topic1
Switched to branch 'topic1'
$ git log
commit 97c4da49eda8de7b273003515a660945c (HEAD -> topic1)
Author: User <user@example.com>
Date: Thu Aug 1 14:22:39 2024 -0700
fix a third typo
$ git branch --force main
$ git log
commit 97c4da49eda8de7b273003515a660945c (HEAD -> topic1, main)
Author: User <user@example.com>
Date: Thu Aug 1 14:22:39 2024 -0700
fix a third typoSee what happened to main? It moved to the current commit! You can see it in the output for the second git log.
You could also specify a destination for main as a second argument if you wanted it to move somewhere other than your current location.
Did you accidentally commit some secret password into your repo? Can you use git reset to back out of that commit?
If the answer was yes, you might find git reset -p useful to selectively reset parts of commits, something we’ll cover in a later chapter.