Question

I just checked out an earlier commit from my local git repo. I haven’t made any changes to it, I was just looking at it. Now I want to go back to my latest commit – how do I do that?

The exact command I used to check it out:

git checkout e5dff6b3c5d704f9b598de46551355d18235ac08

Now when I type git log, at the top I see this checked out commit, but none of my later commits. Did I accidentally delete those?

Answer 1

Try this first:

git checkout master

(If you’re on a different branch than master (or main), use the branch name there instead.)

If that doesn’t work, try…

For a single file:

git checkout HEAD /path/to/file

For the entire repository working copy:

git reset --hard HEAD

And if that doesn’t work, then you can look in the reflog to find your old head SHA and reset to that:

git reflog
git reset --hard <sha from reflog>

HEAD is a name that always points to the latest commit in your current branch.