How to recover my git branch to an appointed commit?

Question

for example: I want to recover to the last 3 commit in remote?

What do you mean by 'recover'? Do you mean view the code at that particular snapshot, for a past commit? — Leigh, May 19 '14 at 03:51
I suggest you reading http://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask and edit this question to fulfill the standards of this page. — Florian Neumann, May 19 '14 at 06:53

score 0 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 10:32

What you fetch from a remote is the full history of a repo and its branches.

But once fetched, nothing prevents you to reset your branch to 3 commits back:

git checkout yourBranch
git reset --hard HEAD~3

Make sure you don't have any work in progress (they would be erase), and you would have to force your push to the upstream branch:

git push -f origin yourBranch

This isn't considered a good practice if you have others fetching that same branch from the same remote repo.

The other technique (which doesn't involve rewriting the history) is to revert: see for instance "Reverting a series of pushed merges and commits in Git (without rewriting history)"

git revert HEAD~3..HEAD

That will create a new commit which will cancel the last 3. You can push it as usual.

1 Answers1