Question

I did something stupid and accidently merged a topic branch into my master branch and then pushed it live to github (where others have pulled). Just to make sure it was a completely moronic mistake, I pulled it out to my production servers.

I’ve hung my head in shame for the appropriate amount of time and now I need to figure out how to effectively roll back the code commits while progressing the commit history.

To get my production code to the correct checkout, I ran git checkout hashoflettersandnumbers and that’s the commit I want the production HEAD to be.

I run git reset hashoflettersandnumbers and then git clean to remove the changes from that commit going forward, but I can’t seem to get that code to be the HEAD of the master branch and make a fresh commit.

Answer 1

Use git revert on each of the branches. This will create a new commit that preserves your mistake for all eternity, but gives you back the same tree as you had before you merged.

For example, if 123456 is the merge commit…

$ git checkout master
$ git revert 123456
$ git checkout topic-branch
$ git revert 123456

This assumes that this wasn’t a “fast-forward” merge.