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Oops, I just pushed a git commit to the wrong branch. What now?

Nick Raphael on January 23, 2020

We are currently running off two active branches in our git repository. And by accident I just committed an update on the wrong branch and pushed ...

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Erebos Manannán • Jan 23 '20

The fact that Git allows you to edit history is one of the biggest issues with Git - if you make a mistake, don't try to hide it, but actually fix it - reverse commit and push. No need for push -f (every time you do that, you should think you are doing something incredibly wrong) and potentially ruining other people's ability to sync with the repository as well.

git revert 65c356c8c

After fixing the branch, you can of course continue to cherry pick the commit to your other branch.

Nick Raphael • Jan 23 '20

I completely agree. I think this is a better solution than my post. Let me run this past you...

First I can get the commit into the correct branch with:
git checkout Branch2
git cherry-pick 65c356c8c

I then undo the other commit with:
git checkout Branch1
git revert 65c356c8c

Is that your suggestion?

Erebos Manannán • Jan 24 '20

Well your #1 priority should be to fix what you broke. Since revert does not remove the commit, you don't need to hurry with "saving it" or anything - first revert and push to fix what you broke, then you can go about cherry-picking it to where you needed the code in.

Bauke Regnerus • Jan 24 '20

Force pushing is absolutely fine in case of personal feature branches.

Stephan Meijer • Jan 24 '20

No it's not. We also have this rule, and I so do it. But it's not "absolutely fine".

A reviewer might already have checked your branch before. And by changing your history, you remove the option for them to only review your latest changes.

The entire review must now be done all over.

Comments that were bound to a specific commit, are now gone as well.

Bauke Regnerus • Jan 24 '20 • Edited

Agreed. That's why I said "personal" feature branch, before it's touched or reviewed by anybody else.

Then again, I don't mind a force push to prevent commits like "oops forgot semicolon". Commits like that are pollution and won't help anybody in the future trying to look back in history. I usually remove them when a pull request is ready to be merged.

Comments are temporary anyway and no replacement for documentation.

After all it's about knowing what your doing. I prefer communication/education over arbitrary rules in my team.

Shamsad • Jan 23 '20

In this case you will have to force push (push -f) your branch (Branch1). Force pushing a branch is generally not a good idea, unless you are absolutely sure that nobody else has pulled from that branch.

In this scenario revert is the safest choice to remove unwanted changes from a branch that's already been pushed.

Maelig • Jan 23 '20 • Edited

Better use git push --force-with-lease to be sure you don't override your colleagues work if they pushed before you pushed force.

More info :

Kaartic Sivaraam • Jan 23 '20

Yeah. Its good to use --force-with-lease instead of --force. Its also worth noting the case in which --force-with-lease might not work as you expect it to.

Quoting from –force considered harmful; understanding git’s –force-with-lease:

A more subtle problem is that it is possible to trick git into thinking that a branch has not been modified when it has. The main way that this would happen under normal usage is when Bob uses git fetch rather than git pull to update his local copy. The fetch will pull the objects and refs from the remote, but without a matching merge does not update the working tree. This will make it look as if the working copy of the remote is up to date with the remote without actually including the new work, and trick --force-with-lease into overwriting the remote branch, as you can see in this example: ...