Question

I have a git repository in which I have made quite a few changes, and pushed to a remote location.

I wish to reset the repository to the 3 commit from the first, push it to the remote branch. I’m considering doing the following :-

• git reset
• git push origin master

A couple of doubts regarding the same?

• Would this be the right way to do it?
• I have deleted certain files and added a few files after the 3rd commit(from the first). I wish to change all that back to the state of the 3rd commit(get back the deleted files, remove the newly added ones). How could I go about doing that?

Thanks.

[EDIT]
I’m a solo developer on this project at this point in time. Also there are quite a few commits made so Id rather not manually have to revert each one of them.

Answer 1

As you already sent your files to a remote repository, it is not a good idea to perform a git reset because other developers should updated their local repositories and get the new updates. The best solution is to perform a git revert, a command that generates a new commit that undo what a previous commit did. For more information, take a look at this link.

But if you were the only developer of this project, you can delete the commits. For this, you can use the git reset command:

git reset --hard hash

where hash is the commit hash that you want to return. The option --hard is to almost complete remove the commits after the commit hash you passed.

As you were changing the project history, you can’t perform a simple push. You will need the flag -f to force the update:

git push -f origin master

However, some remote repositories have some hook that prohibits you to force update the history. You will need to delete this hook to allow you to perform a history update. If you can’t do this, you will need to use the git revert command.