So, you'll need to do a force push (or force push with lease to stop if any changes have been pushed in the interim). You won't be able to push without pulling from your upstream, but obviously you don't want to pull the changes you're trying to revert.

In that case you would reset to a commit on your temporary branch. You can also create a temporary branch from the previous commit if you would like to make changes there first before doing the reset. It doesn't have to be a hard reset, since that only deals with what to do with your current working changes, so that part is up to you. The better way (obviously after consulting with your team so they don't keep working on a problematic branch) is to git reset to an earlier commit. If you attempt to merge that branch later on, you'll find those prior commits are missing. Now the remote branch should be in previous state.Īs mentioned in another answer, the primary issue with doing a git revert on a merge is that git still thinks all the previous commits were merged (it only changes the code). Now Vim editor is opened, just mark undesired commits as drop and same and quit using :wq Instead of 6 use appropriate number based on how many past commits you want to change. The solution was simple, which will work in case of normal scenarios, where we don't have in-between commits: git rebase -i HEAD~6 So in this case git revert -m 1 was not working as it was leaving those f1 and f2 commits in between. This might have happened because while working on my branch I did a merge from master after 2 commits, or one of 2 branches might not have been up to date with master. So my branch history was like this: my-branch (before merge)Īfter merging it with another feature-branch which had commits f1, f2 on top of master, it became like this: my-branch (after merge) In my case, I merged my branch (say: my-branch) with another feature branch (feature-branch) but not master. Lastly push the changes, Now the merge commit changes gone and the Log will look like,

So that creates a Revert commit that does the inverse changes of the merge commit. Now a commit message will show in editor that specifies the details, check and verify. To revert the merge commit and get back to 12a7327 need to do, # To the First parent Merge pull request #1 from Akshay/revert-test Note that the merge commit - 2ec06d9 has two parents now - 12a7327 (in main) and 15bde47 (in revert-test), checking git log now, > git logĬommit 2ec06d9d315a3f7919ffe4ad2c2d7cec8c8f9aa3 (HEAD -> main, origin/main, origin/HEAD) I want to undo the merge commit and go back to the last commit in the main branch - which is 12a7327 Then, created a pull request from GitHub and merged revert-test branch to main. Now, I've added some new files, modified existing files, and created separate commits on each branch, then pushed them to the origin. (For graphical view of commits use -graph with git log OR this more interactive VS code extension - git graph) # remember to check and verify the parent1 and parent2 with git log command.Ĭreated a new branch revert-test on an existing project that has only main branch, The commit graph looks like this now. # To revert to C4 in master branchįor some other cases, if needed revert to C5, # revert to C5 in iss53 branch Switch to the branch on which the merge was made ( it is the master branch here and we aim to remove the iss53 branch from it )ĭo the git revert with -m 1 flag. The C4 commit is in master branch and we need to revert to that, that is parent 1 and -m 1 is needed here (use git log C4 to verify the previous commits to confirm parent branch).

It will be in the format of Merge: parent1 parent2, here Merge: C4 C5. So it must specify which parent to use for the revert command.įor that check the git log, ( here representing actual commit hash with code names from graph) > git logįrom git log output, note down the parent IDs that come with Merge:. Need to revert C6 and return the repository to its state at C4. The iss53 branch was merged into master, creating a Merge Commit, C6. As git cannot determine which parent is the mainline and which is the branch to un-merge automatically, so this must be specified. To specify the desired parent, uses the -m flag. Reverting a merge commit is not straightforward as with git revert, since Git gets confused when looking back from the merge commit due to its two parent commits. More explanation for given answer git revert -m 1 with a graphical representation and an example, step-by-step.

Git merge master into branch and push