Revert a commit

Reverting a commit in Git is a valuable skill that allows you to correct mistakes, undo changes, or manage your commit history effectively. Whether you need to remove the last commit, discard specific changes, or entirely erase a commit, Git provides various tools to help you undo commits and maintain a clean development history.

In this part of our tutorial, we will explore the process of reverting a commit in Git.

Go to the git-tutorial/tutorial2 directory you previously downloaded.

When you examine the history of this repository, it will look like the following:

We will undo the “append description of the pull command” commit using the git revert command.

First, open the sample.txt file and verify that its content looks like the following:

Anyone can learn Git with this tutorial and Backlog
add: Register a change in an index
commit: Save the status of an index
pull: Obtain the content of the remote repository

We will undo the latest HEAD commit titled “append description of the pull command” using the revert command, as follows:

$ git revert HEAD
[main d47bb1d] Revert "append description of the pull command"
  1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)

Now when we open sample.txt you will see that the last line (i.e., “pull: Obtain the content of the remote repository”) will no longer exist.

Use the git log command to verify that the new history looks like the following:

$ git log
  commit 7bcf5e3b6fc47e875ec226ce2b13a53df73cf626
  Author: yourname <yourname@yourmail.com>
  Date:   Wed Jul 18 15:46:28 2022 +0900

      Revert "append description of the pull command"

      This reverts commit 0d4a808c26908cd5fe4b6294a00150342d1a58be.

  commit 0d4a808c26908cd5fe4b6294a00150342d1a58be
  Author: yourname <yourname@yourmail.com>
  Date:   Mon Jul 16 23:19:26 2022 +0900

      append description of the pull command

  commit 9a54fd4dd22dbe22dd966581bc78e83f16cee1d7
  Author: yourname <yourname@yourmail.com>
  Date:   Mon Jul 16 23:19:01 2022 +0900

      append description of the commit command

  commit 326fc9f70d022afdd31b0072dbbae003783d77ed
  Author: yourname <yourname@yourmail.com>
  Date:   Mon Jul 16 23:17:56 2022 +0900

      append description of the add command

  commit 48eec1ddf73a7fb508ef664efd6b3d873631742f
  Author: yourname <yourname@yourmail.com>
  Date:   Mon Jul 16 23:16:14 2022 +0900

      first commit