How can I undo latest commit and retain changes?

Question

I have several commits already and I need to undo the latest one but to have changes I made in it in place. Please advice how to do that. Thank you.

Answer 1

git reset --soft HEAD^

Note that you should only rewind HEAD if it's not pushed yet.

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edit In response to your comment on the original question:

If you only want to edit the most recent commit, Git has a neat feature commit --amend. Simply use git add/git rm/git checkout until your index is in the state you want it to be (new changes added, some changes thrown away, files removed, …). Then use git commit --amend, it will pop up vi (or whatever you have configured in core.editor) with your last commit's commit message for you to edit.

Note, that when I say ›edit the most recent commit‹, Git actually creates a new commit. So don't do it, when the commit was already pulled from other people (i.e. pushed to your public repository)

Answer 2

If you want to update the most recent commit, then amending this commit would do the job:

<do the changes you want to>
git add <missing files>
git add <changed files>
git commit --amend

That's it.

If you need to change comment and add some other files to previous commit, I suggest you do interactive rebase instead.

<do the changes you want to>
git add <missing files>
git commit -a
git rebase -i HEAD~3

In editor that pops up you'll see something like

pick <SHA1> Commit that you wanted to change
pick <SHA2> Next commit that you seem to try to rollback in your question
pick <SHA3> Just committed fixes to SHA1

Change it to be

pick <SHA1> Commit that you wanted to change
f <SHA3> Just committed fixes to SHA1
pick <SHA2> Next commit that you seem to try to rollback in your question

('f' means 'fixup' -- squash SHA1 ans SHA3 and discard commit message of SHA3 one)

Save changes, quit editor. You are done.

That should never be done for commits you've already pushed upstream.