Git Revert

Another command that is used for undoing changes is git revert and this command creates a new commit which reverts commit that you've specified in the command, so you can probably notice a difference here between git reset command which moves HEAD and branch ref pointers, and git revert which creates a new revert commit, this also means that this command will not change project history which makes it safe operation for undoing changes. Let's see some examples.

➜  git-basics-beginners git:(master) touch git-revert.txt && git add git-revert.txt && git commit -m "Add git-revert.txt file"
[master 7079239] Add git-revert.txt file
 1 file changed, 0 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
 create mode 100644 git-revert.txt

➜  git-basics-beginners git:(master) echo "This is an example of git revert command" > git-revert.txt && git add .
➜  git-basics-beginners git:(master) ✗ git commit -m "Add content into git-revert.txt"
[master 1798147] Add content into git-revert.txt
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)

➜  git-basics-beginners git:(master) ✗ git commit -m "Add a new line into git-revert.txt"
[master e392351] Add a new line into git-revert.txt
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)

At this point we've created three commits. First, we added a new file, then we've added the first and second line to git-revert.txt file. For every action, we've made a separate commit, and we can see those commits using git log command, I passed -5 option to list me last 5 commits, and --no-pager option which just tells git to not open list of logs in interactive pager view.

➜  git-basics-beginners git:(master) git --no-pager log --oneline -5
e392351 (HEAD -> master) Add a new line into git-revert.txt
1798147 Add content into git-revert.txt
7079239 Add git-revert.txt file
8cb327d Add Git Revert section
f9a723d (origin/master) Add git reset --hard explanation

➜  git-basics-beginners git:(master) cat git-revert.txt
This is an example of git revert command
This is a bad update

➜  git-basics-beginners git:(master) git revert HEAD
[master c4a011a] Fix bad update commit
 1 file changed, 1 deletion(-)

git revert HEAD will basically revert the last commit. By default it uses --edit option which will open your default editor and ask you to edit commit message. Also, notice what cat command displays, before we reverted the last commit we had two lines in git-revert.txt file and after revert we have one line Now by inspecting our log history you can see that we now have one more commit.

➜  git-basics-beginners git:(master) cat git-revert.txt
This is an example of git revert command

➜  git-basics-beginners git:(master) git --no-pager log --oneline -5
c4a011a (HEAD -> master) Fix bad update commit
e392351 Add a new line into git-revert.txt
1798147 Add content into git-revert.txt
7079239 Add git-revert.txt file
8cb327d Add Git Revert section

You can pass --no-edit option to git revert command which will tell git to not open editor, but this will add auto-generated commit message which will be Revert <commit-message-of-reverted-commit> There is an option to not create commit --no-commit which you can pass to git revert command. This will revert specified commit and add reverted changes into the Staging Area, so you can add more changes and then make a new commit.