Question

Let me preface this by saying that I am relatively new to git so I might have difficulty correctly expressing my situation.

I was doing some work on a project and I wanted to commit the changes I had made. I proceeded to run through the next few commands:

   git add .
   git commit -m "Finished user signup"

At this point, it appeared to process my commit and handled all the changes, insertions, and deletions. Then I proceeded with:

    git checkout master

It successfully switched to the master branch. I thought I had been in a branch at the time and I tried merging it, but that didn’t work so I just moved forward. I pushed and everything was up to date. Then I made some quick changes to other files and tried:

    git commit -am "Add SSL in production"

It was successful. However, now all of my changes prior to this last commit are gone and I would really like to get them back if possible. I now realize that perhaps I need to take a step back and actually UNDERSTAND git rather than just running through the steps of the tutorial I’m following, but I really would love to get a mulligan on this one if possible. If you have any ideas how I can git my files back I could really use your help.

Edit: I tried looking at the log with “git log” and it doesn’t show any sign of the commit I want to recover…

Answer 1

From what I can understand you switched from the topic-branch to the master branch but you didn’t merge the topic-branch’s commits. You can do this using the git command merge or rebase:

# Be sure you're in the master branch, you should see a star before master
$git checkout master
$git branch
# Now take the commits from the topic-branch
$git rebase TOPIC_BRANCH_NAME

Using $git log you should be able now to see the other branch’s commits.