how to delete a commit

This post will discuss how to delete commits from a Git branch.

1. git reset

Here, the idea is to force reset the working directory to remove all commits which come after the specified commit and then do a force push:

git reset –hard [<commit>]

You can refer to a commit via its ancestry, using its full SHA-1 hash, or providing the partial hash, which should be at least 4 characters long and unambiguous.

# Discard the first 4 commits
git reset –hard HEAD~4

If those commits are present in the remote repository, you will need to force push the hard reset to the remote repository.

# Force Push updates to the remote repository
git push [-f | –force]

Here's a live example:

git reset --hard

Note that any changes made in the working directory since the last commit are silently discarded. To avoid it, stash your local changes first by calling the git-stash command, which in turn also revert the working directory to the HEAD revision after saving your local modifications. git reset --hard HEAD is often used to delete all uncommitted changes to match the most recent commit in the working directory.

In case you want to keep your work and only undo the commit, you can use the --soft option.

git reset –soft [<commit>]

This is demonstrated below:

git reset soft

2. git revert

It is not a good idea to do a force push on a public or a shared repository; do a git-revert instead. It creates a new commit that undoes all the specified commit changes, then applies it to the current branch.

# Revert the commit 87859b5
git revert 87859b5

# Push to the remote
git push

Here's a live example:

git revert

3. Interactive Rebasing

Another plausible way of removing comments is using the git-rebase command.

git rebase -i [<commit>]

Executing the above command will open up an editor with all the commits in your current branch, which come after the specified commit. To drop a commit, simply replace the command 'pick' with 'drop' and close the editor. You can also delete the matching line.

git rebase