How to fix committing to the wrong Git branch?

Question

I just made a perfectly good commit to the wrong branch. How do I undo the last commit in my master branch and then take those same changes and get them into my upgrade bran

Answer 1

If you run into this issue and you have Visual Studio, you can do the following:

Right-click on your branch and select View History:

Right-click on commit you want to go back to. And Revert or Reset as needed.

Answer 2

If you have a clean (un-modified) working copy

To rollback one commit (make sure you note the commit's hash for the next step):

git reset --hard HEAD^

To pull that commit into a different branch:

git checkout other-branch
git cherry-pick COMMIT-HASH

If you have modified or untracked changes

Also note that git reset --hard will kill any untracked and modified changes you might have, so if you have those you might prefer:

git reset HEAD^
git checkout .

Answer 3

So if your scenario is that you've committed to master but meant to commit to another-branch (which may or not may not already exist) but you haven't pushed yet, this is pretty easy to fix.

// if your branch doesn't exist, then add the -b argument 
git checkout -b another-branch
git branch --force master origin/master

Now all your commits to master will be on another-branch.

Sourced with love from: http://haacked.com/archive/2015/06/29/git-migrate/

Answer 4

4 years late on the topic, but this might be helpful to someone.

If you forgot to create a new branch before committing and committed all on master, no matter how many commits you did, the following approach is easier:

git stash                       # skip if all changes are committed
git branch my_feature
git reset --hard origin/master
git checkout my_feature
git stash pop                   # skip if all changes were committed

Now you have your master branch equals to origin/master and all new commits are on my_feature. Note that my_feature is a local branch, not a remote one.

Answer 5

If you haven't yet pushed your changes, you can also do a soft reset:

git reset --soft HEAD^

This will revert the commit, but put the committed changes back into your index. Assuming the branches are relatively up-to-date with regard to each other, git will let you do a checkout into the other branch, whereupon you can simply commit:

git checkout branch
git commit

The disadvantage is that you need to re-enter your commit message.

Answer 6

To elaborate on this answer, in case you have multiple commits to move from, e.g. develop to new_branch:

git checkout develop # You're probably there already
git reflog # Find LAST_GOOD, FIRST_NEW, LAST_NEW hashes
git checkout new_branch
git cherry-pick FIRST_NEW^..LAST_NEW # ^.. includes FIRST_NEW
git reflog # Confirm that your commits are safely home in their new branch!
git checkout develop
git reset --hard LAST_GOOD # develop is now back where it started