[GIT] How do I revert from my current state to a snapshot made on a certain commit?

source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4114095/revert-to-previous-git-commit

question:

How do I revert from my current state to a snapshot made on a certain commit?

If I do git log, I get the following output:

[root@me dev]# git log
commit a867b4af366350be2e7c21b8de9cc6504678a61b`
Author: Me 
Date:   Thu Nov 4 18:59:41 2010 -0400

blah blah blah...

commit 25eee4caef46ae64aa08e8ab3f988bc917ee1ce4
Author: Me 
Date:   Thu Nov 4 05:13:39 2010 -0400

more blah blah blah...

commit 0766c053c0ea2035e90f504928f8df3c9363b8bd
Author: Me 
Date:   Thu Nov 4 00:55:06 2010 -0400

And yet more blah blah...

commit 0d1d7fc32e5a947fbd92ee598033d85bfc445a50
Author: Me 
Date:   Wed Nov 3 23:56:08 2010 -0400

Yep, more blah blah.

How do revert to the commit from November 3?

answer:

This depends a lot on what you mean by "revert".

If you want to temporarily go back to it, fool around, then come back to where you are, all you have to do is check out the desired commit:

# This will detach your HEAD, i.e. leave you with no branch checked out:
git checkout 0d1d7fc32

or if you want to make commits while you're there, go ahead and make a new branch while you're at it:

git checkout -b old-state 0d1d7fc32

If, on the other hand, you want to really get rid of everything you've done since then, there are two possibilities. One, if you haven't published any of these commits, simply reset:

# This will destroy any local modifications.
# Don't do it if you have uncommitted work you want to keep.
git reset --hard 0d1d7fc32

# Alternatively, if there's work to keep:
git stash
git reset --hard 0d1d7fc32
git stash pop
# This saves the modifications, then reapplies that patch after resetting.
# You could get merge conflicts, if you've modified things which were
# changed since the commit you reset to

On the other hand, if you've published the work, you probably don't want to reset the branch, since that's effectively rewriting history. In that case, you could indeed revert the commits. With git, revert has a very specific meaning: create a commit with the reverse patch to cancel it out. This way you don't rewrite any history.

# This will create three separate revert commits:
git revert 0766c053 25eee4ca a867b4af

# It also takes ranges. This will revert the last two commits:
git revert HEAD~2..HEAD

# To get just one, you could use `rebase -i` to squash them afterwards
# Or, you could do it manually (be sure to do this at top level of the repo)
# get your index and work tree into the desired state, without changing HEAD:
git checkout 0d1d7fc32 .
# and then commit
git commit    # be sure and write a good message describing what you just did

The git-revert manpage actually covers a lot of this in its description. Another useful link is this git-scm.com blog post discussing git-revert.