Question

Here are my commits:

A B C

With C being the current commit. I want things to look like this on origin:

A B C A

So A is my current commit, but B and C are retained. I currently have the repo cloned with C being the current commit. What do I need to do next to get origin how I want it?

Answer 1

Commits ‘B’ and ‘C’ are progressive states of the branch’s history. To reset to ‘A’ without losing ‘B’ or ‘C’ locally, just use a new branch on origin:

git checkout -B new-branch master
git reset --hard <A_commit_hash>
git push origin new-branch

‘B’ and ‘C’ will be retained on ‘master’, so you can git cherry-pick <commit_of_B_or_C> or git merge master without trouble.

If you really want ‘B’ and C’, but want to reset ‘master’ to ‘A’, and have thought through the consequences of forcibly overwriting your remote:

git branch archived-master master ;# create 'archived-master' branch
git reset --hard A ;# reset master to 'A' state
git push -f origin master ;# overwrite remote's master

That’ll save ‘B’ and ‘C’ locally on the ‘archived-master’ branch.

I would avoid git revert for this. Revert commits make commands like git bisect and git rebase more difficult, and if you ever want to reuse ‘B’ and ‘C’ it’s harder for a human to parse the history.