Undoing and recovering

One of the main points of version control is that you can go back in time to recover. Unlike this xkcd comic implies: https://xkcd.com/1597/

This lesson covers four types of undoing:

• Go back to your last commit, remove all latest changes.
• Selectively revert one commit, without modifying history (git revert).
• Change a commit right after it’s been done (git commit --amend).
• Rewind in time to a previous commit (git reset --hard).

Your instructor will choose two to do two in this lesson.

Discussion: undoing

When have you made a change, and had to go through much more trouble to figure out what you did, or fix it?

As long as you commit something once (or at least git add it), you can almost always go back to it, no matter what you do, within ~2 weeks. But you may need to ask stackoverflow or your local guru… until that guru becomes you.

Undoing your recent, uncommitted changes

You do some work, and want to undo everything and go back to your last commit. You can always do that with:

• git checkout -f master: go back to master, no matter what.

Or, you can undo things selectively, as you have already learned:

• git checkout -p or git checkout $file (working dir)
• git reset -p or git reset $file (staging area)

Clear your workspace

• If you have unstaged changes from earlier sections, remove them and get a clean working directory.
• git status should report nothing.

Note: we’ve seen some time when git checkout -f master doesn’t work. Can you figure out when? If it doesn’t work, try git reset --hard HEAD.

Reverting commits

• Imagine we made a few commits.
• We realize that the latest commit f960dd3 was a mistake and we wish to undo it:

$ git log --oneline

f960dd3 (HEAD -> master) not sure this is a good idea
dd4472c we should not forget to enjoy
2bb9bb4 add half an onion
2d79e7e adding ingredients and instructions

A safe way to undo the commit is to revert the commit with git revert:

$ git revert f960dd3

This creates a new commit that does the opposite of the reverted commit. The old commit remains in the history:

$ git log --oneline

d62ad3e (HEAD -> master) Revert "not sure this is a good idea"
f960dd3 not sure this is a good idea
dd4472c we should not forget to enjoy
2bb9bb4 add half an onion
2d79e7e adding ingredients and instructions

You can revert any commit, no matter how old it is. It doesn’t affect other commits you have done since then - but if they touch the same code, you may get a conflict (which we’ll learn about later).

Exercise: Revert a commit

• Create a commit.
• Revert the commit with git revert.
• Inspect the history with git log --oneline.
• Now try git show on both the reverted and the newly created commit.

(optional) Modifying history

Modifying history? Isn’t a “commit” permanent?

• No, you can modify old history.
• But if you have shared that history already, modifying it will make a huge mess.

The following two commands are dangerous if you use them without being careful. Use them only before you have pushed commits, until you have more practice!

(optional) Adding to the previous commit

Sometimes we commit but realize we forgot something. We can amend to the last commit:

$ git commit --amend

This can also be used to modify the last commit message.

Note that this will change the commit hash. This command modifies the history. This means that we never use this command on commits that we have shared with others.

Exercise: Modify a previous commit

1. Make an incomplete change to the recipe or a typo in your change, git add and git commit the incomplete/unsatisfactory change.
2. Inspect the unsatisfactory but committed change with git show. Remember the commit hash.
3. Now complete/fix the change but instead of creating a new commit, add to the previous commit with git commit --amend. What changed?

(optional) Rewind history

You can reset branch history to move your branch head back to some point in the past.

• git reset --hard $commit will force a branch head to any other point. All other changes are lost.
• Be careful if you do this - it can mess stuff up. Use git log a lot before and after.

Exercise: Destroy our experimentation in this episode

After we have experimented with reverts and amending, let us destroy all of that and get our repositories to a similar state.

• First, we will look at our history git log and find the last commit $commit before our tests.
• Then, we will git reset --hard $commit to that.
• Then, git log again to see what happened.

$ git log --oneline

d62ad3e (HEAD -> master) Revert "not sure this is a good idea"
f960dd3 not sure this is a good idea
dd4472c we should not forget to enjoy
2bb9bb4 add half an onion
2d79e7e adding ingredients and instructions

$ git reset --hard dd4472c

HEAD is now at dd4472c we should not forget to enjoy

$ git log --oneline

dd4472c (HEAD -> master) we should not forget to enjoy
2bb9bb4 add half an onion
2d79e7e adding ingredients and instructions

Test your understanding

1. What happens if you accidentally remove a tracked file with git rm, is it gone forever?
2. Is it OK to modify commits that nobody has seen yet?
3. What situations would justify to modify the Git history and possibly remove commits?
4. What is the difference between these commands?

   $ git diff
   $ git diff --staged  # or git diff --cached
   $ git diff HEAD
   $ git diff HEAD^
   

Solution

1. It is not gone forever since git rm creates a new commit. You can simply revert it!
2. If you haven’t shared your commits with anyone it can be alright to modify them.
3. If you have shared your commits with others (e.g. pushed them to GitHub), only extraordinary conditions would justify modifying history. For example to remove sensitive or secret information.
4. The different commands show changes between different file states:

   $ git diff          # Show what has changed but hasn't been staged yet via git add.
   $ git diff --staged # Show what has been staged but not yet committed.
   $ git diff HEAD     # Show what has changed since the last commit.
   $ git diff HEAD^    # Show what has changed since the commit before the latest commit.