Undo a Git merge that hasn't been pushed yet

Question

Within my master branch, I did a git merge some-other-branch locally, but never pushed the changes to origin master. I didn\'t mean to merge, so I\'d like to un

Answer 1

With newer Git versions, if you have not committed the merge yet and you have a merge conflict, you can simply do:

git merge --abort

From man git merge:

[This] can only be run after the merge has resulted in conflicts. git merge --abort will abort the merge process and try to reconstruct the pre-merge state.

Answer 2

It is strange that the simplest command was missing. Most answers work, but undoing the merge you just did, this is the easy and safe way:

git reset --merge ORIG_HEAD

The ref ORIG_HEAD will point to the original commit from before the merge.

(The --merge option has nothing to do with the merge. It's just like git reset --hard ORIG_HEAD, but safer since it doesn't touch uncommitted changes.)

Answer 3

With git reflog check which commit is one prior the merge (git reflog will be a better option than git log). Then you can reset it using:

git reset --hard commit_sha

There's also another way:

git reset --hard HEAD~1

It will get you back 1 commit.

Be aware that any modified and uncommitted/unstashed files will be reset to their unmodified state. To keep them either stash changes away or see --merge option below.

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As @Velmont suggested below in his answer, in this direct case using:

git reset --hard ORIG_HEAD

might yield better results, as it should preserve your changes. ORIG_HEAD will point to a commit directly before merge has occurred, so you don't have to hunt for it yourself.

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A further tip is to use the --merge switch instead of --hard since it doesn't reset files unnecessarily:

git reset --merge ORIG_HEAD

--merge

Resets the index and updates the files in the working tree that are different between <commit> and HEAD, but keeps those which are different between the index and working tree (i.e. which have changes which have not been added).

Answer 4

If you want a command-line solution, I suggest to just go with MBO's answer.

If you're a newbie, you might like the graphical approach:

1. Kick off gitk (from the command line, or right click in file browser if you have that)
2. You can easily spot the merge commit there - the first node from the top with two parents
3. Follow the link to the first/left parent (the one on your current branch before the merge, usually red for me)
4. On the selected commit, right-click "Reset branch to here", pick the hard reset there

Answer 5

If you didn't commit it yet, you can only use

$ git checkout -f

It will undo the merge (and everything that you did).

Answer 6

The simplest answer is the one given by odinho - Velmont

First do git reset --merge ORIG_HEAD

For those looking to reset after changes are pushed, do this (Because this is the first post seen for any git reset merge questions)

git push origin HEAD --force

This will reset in a way that you won't get the merged changes back again after pull.