Best Practice for Reverting...

[Richard Coy]

Hello, I am totally new to this git and repositories thing but I can see the benifits right away.

What is the best way to completely revert to a previous commit? Let's say I want to go back three commits ago and start over from that point. I'm using SourceTree.

[MikeL · Accepted solution]

If you want to trash the last 3 commits, select the commit you want to keep and invoke reset with the hard-option.

[Richard Coy]

Thanks Mike. So in SourceTree is that right click on the commit I want and then choose "Reset master to this commit"? Does that change my local and remote repositories at the same time or is there a step after that for syncing?

[stevestreeting]

If you've already pushed these commits to a remote then you probably shouldn't be doing this, because the commits could already have been seen by someone else, which will then cause them problems if they're effectively orphaned and no longer part of the branch going forward.

If you know for sure that no-one except you has seen these commits then you can push your branch to the remote to bring it back into sync with your own local repo. What the reset is doing is moving the branch pointer backwards, orphaning the commits you made before, and which will get garbage collected eventually if nothing continued to point to them.

[Richard Coy]

Thanks Steve. I'm the only developer on my current project so it's safe to do this but I'll remember in the future not to do it if I'm working with others.