Question

I’ve read the similar posts on this topic, and can’t for the life of me figure out how to do this properly.

I checked in about 1000 files that I don’t want, and I’d rather not have to go through 1by1 and remove them all from the repo.

• I have a remote master Branch.
• I have the local master Branch.

They are both at the same revision.

I want to rollback my remote by 1 commit.

Say my history on master is A--B--C--D--E.
I want to rollback my local to D.
Then push it to remote so my current hash will be D both remote and local.

I’m having issues doing this.
I’m using Git Tower but am comfortable with the command line. Any help?

UPDATE:
Great comments below. Using a reset seems to be partially discouraged especially if the repository is shared with other users.
What’s the best way to undo the previous commit’s changes without using a hard reset? Is there a way?

Answer 1

If nobody has pulled your remote repo yet, you can change your branch HEAD and force push it to said remote repo:

git reset --hard HEAD^ 
git push -f 

(or, if you have direct access to the remote repo, you can change its HEAD reference even though it is a bare repo)

Note, as commented by alien-technology in the comments below, on Windows (CMD session), you would need ^^:

git reset --hard HEAD^^
git push -f 

And? as noted in the comments by Jon Schneider:

If the command with "HEAD^" results in error no matches found: HEAD^, see "git show HEAD^ doesn’t seem to be working. Is this normal?"

Update since 2011:
Using git push --force-with-lease (that I present here, introduced in 2013 with Git 1.8.5) is safer.

See Schwern‘s answer for illustration.

---

What if somebody has already pulled the repo? What would I do then?

Then I would suggest something that doesn’t rewrite the history:

• git revert locally your last commit (creating a new commit that reverses what the previous commit did)
• push the ‘revert’ generated by git revert.