Question

I am new to open source and git. I have been learning git and contributing to a project. I have been assigned the task of looking into its git history at past commits and learning from the code then (since the project has evolved now).
I know that git stores the entire history of the project. So is there a way to revert to an older version of the project locally. I don’t intend to or have rights to revert its remote repo back in time, I just want to revert my local copy to an older commit.

Answer 1

gitk shows a graphical history of commits, each with a unique SHA hash indentifier.

You can checkout to an earlier version using git checkout {commit id}. You make Git revert to an earlier version using these commands:

# reset the index to the desired tree
git reset 56e05fced

# move the branch pointer back to the previous HEAD
git reset --soft HEAD@{1}

git commit -m "Revert to 56e05fced"

# Update working copy to reflect the new commit
git reset --hard

Revert to a commit by a SHA hash in Git?