Newbie: Restore messed up code from local or remote repository

Hello -- Extreme Git Newbie

I have a project that is checked into a local git repository as well as pushed to a remote repository.

Through misadventure I've managed to screw up my working code and want to restore what I had from my last commit on either the local or remote repositories.

So I blew away my messed up working files and tried:

git checkout git pull -f /path/to/remote/repos git fetch -f /path/to/remote/repos

None of the above did the trick. The two remote commands reported that everything was Already up-to-date! (even though I'd deleted a lot of local working files)

What am I missing?  How can I restore my previous state from last commit?

Thanks! Greg

Hi Greg,

gzoller writes:

Yes, there's really nothing to download. Everything that needs to be fetched has already been fetched :)

See `--hard` switch of `git reset`. Use with extreme caution.

To throw *everything* all your local work away and go back to the state of the remote repository, switch to `master` branch and do `git reset --hard origin/master` where `origin` is the name of your remote and `master` is the name of your remote branch.

To reset to the last commit without looking at the remote, run `git reset --hard`.

Note: Again, please understand what it's doing first; don't run it
blindly.

-- Ram

On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 00:22:43 -0800, gzoller wrote:

If you screwed up content of the index, you will need the 'reset' command.

I don't think it does anything without argument. With argument '.' this restores working tree to the state in index (stage). So if you have that screwed up too, it won't be enough.

This is just
    git fetch -f /path/to/remote/repos
followed by
    git merge FETCH_HEAD
(or appropriate tracking branch if you have the remote and tracking branch
set up)

The former ensured the latest revision of remote repo is available. It will not itself

See above.

Yes, using combination of reset and checkout. First make sure the branch you want to use is checked out (git status will tell you if you don't have the git aware shell prompt installed).

Than run

   git reset --hard <the-commit-you-want-to-be-at>

That will unconditionally make the current branch point to the specified commit and make both the index and the working tree match the content of the commit.

If you don't want it to touch the working tree (so you can compare what you had in the working tree with that commit), you'd use --mixed instead of --hard. You can than use checkout to revert those changes -- see above.

On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 1:46 PM, Jan Hudec <bulb@ucw.cz> wrote:

If the problem is that you messed with the index (stage) or the working directory and you want to discard local changes to them, you could also execute "git status" and follow the instruccions there. If that is not enough, report it here.

HTH, Santi

That's cool!  Did the trick, thanks!

While I may get into the fancy stuff of branching (need to read a book on git) usually I use it to protect myself from self-inflicted harm, and want to go back to a happy place in such cases.

Jan Hudec <bulb@ucw.cz> writes:

Actually, the output of "git status" will give you the right command here.