A Life-Saver Git Command

Git is now a ubiquitous skill to any software engineer. To a newbie, Git flow is full of new trickeries, concepts, and gotchas. Fear not, you don’t have to be a Git guru to tame Git to your workflow. My advice to move fast is NOT spending too much time to be a Git expert, but instead, read the git manual to understand the fundamentals so you can get the job done, and occasionally, get yourself out of troubles. Today, I am in big trouble.

The setup

• My repo has a branch named develop
• My repo also has a dir name deployment
• I am working on a branch named release-X
• On my local, I had some commits that I haven’t pushed to GitHub
• I staged all the latest changes in the current repo, ready to commit

The disaster

1. I noticed that I don’t want to include changes in the deployment dir, so I’d like to run git reset deployment
2. But instead, I typed, git reset de<Tab><Enter>, my fingers were too fast to handle 😭
3. The command above auto-completed into git reset develop
4. This moved my HEAD to my local develop branch → I can’t get back to the tip of my local branch release-X
5. To get back to where I was on my local branch release-X, I need to know its commit hash which I don’t

The rescue

Luckily, Git keeps a log of all ref updates, so to get the commit hashes,

git reflog

This will output something like,

39ab761 HEAD@{0}: reset: moving to HEAD~1
b55c098 HEAD@{1}: A very interesting commit...
...

Now I can simply scan the log to find the commit hash that I want to return to, and once I find it, simply run

git reset <hash>

And voila!, I am back with no commit lost, and all the local changes are ready to be committed again 🥰. This is a simple command, but if you don’t know it, you willl have a panic attack when things hit you. And in the long run, you are likely to develop heart-related health issues if you also have fast fingers like mine.