In this lecture

Why?

• Sometimes we make mistakes using git, and we need tools to be able to resolve them (carefully)

What?

• Doing a hard reset to a point in time
• Altering the git history
• Amending a commit

Mistakes

• Everything we've done until this point continues to build on the git history. But we've largely considered the git history immutable.
• With git, sometimes we make mistakes. Sometimes we want to undo things, or change history.

Two ways we're going to discuss this are:

• git resets
• git commit amend

git reset

• Atlassian has a very clear article about git reset. We will use this as guidance.
• We will mainly discuss hard and soft resets through a demonstration

git reset --hard [hash]

Sets all of your code to a specific commit. This is used for saying "I want to go back in time, and I don't care about anything that's happened since that point I'm going back to"

git reset --soft [hash]

Keeps all of your current code the same, but just changes what commit you're pointing to. This is used for saying "I like the code I have, so let's not change anything, but I want to alter the history of commits that got me here"

git commit --amend

git commit --amend -m "Commit"

• Sometimes we need to update our previous commit name. We can do that easily by making another commit that over-rides it.
• The --amend flag will make the commit, but it will replace the most recent commit with the new commit instead of adding another commit to the history
• Let's do a demonstration.

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