Undoing a git rebase

Solution 1:

The easiest way would be to find the head commit of the branch as it was immediately before the rebase started in the reflog...

git reflog

and to reset the current branch to it (with the usual caveats about being absolutely sure before reseting with the --hard option).

Suppose the old commit was HEAD@{2} in the ref log:

git reset --hard HEAD@{2}

In Windows, you may need to quote the reference:

git reset --hard "HEAD@{2}"

You can check the history of the candidate old head by just doing a git log HEAD@{2} (Windows: git log "HEAD@{2}").

If you've not disabled per branch reflogs you should be able to simply do git reflog branchname@{1} as a rebase detaches the branch head before reattaching to the final head. I would double check this, though as I haven't verified this recently.

Per default, all reflogs are activated for non-bare repositories:

[core]
    logAllRefUpdates = true

Solution 2:

Actually, rebase saves your starting point to ORIG_HEAD so this is usually as simple as:

git reset --hard ORIG_HEAD

However, the reset, rebase and merge all save your original HEAD pointer into ORIG_HEAD so, if you've done any of those commands since the rebase you're trying to undo then you'll have to use the reflog.

Solution 3:

Charles's answer works, but you may want to do this:

git rebase --abort

to clean up after the reset.

Otherwise, you may get the message “Interactive rebase already started”.

Solution 4:

Resetting the branch to the dangling commit object of its old tip is of course the best solution, because it restores the previous state without expending any effort. But if you happen to have lost those commits (f.ex. because you garbage-collected your repository in the meantime, or this is a fresh clone), you can always rebase the branch again. The key to this is the --onto switch.

Let’s say you had a topic branch imaginatively called topic, that you branched off master when the tip of master was the 0deadbeef commit. At some point while on the topic branch, you did git rebase master. Now you want to undo this. Here’s how:

git rebase --onto 0deadbeef master topic

This will take all commits on topic that aren’t on master and replay them on top of 0deadbeef.

With --onto, you can rearrange your history into pretty much any shape whatsoever.

Have fun. :-)

Solution 5:

In case you had pushed your branch to remote repository (usually it's origin) and then you've done a succesfull rebase (without merge) (git rebase --abort gives "No rebase in progress") you can easily reset branch using command:

git reset --hard origin/{branchName}

Example:

$ ~/work/projects/{ProjectName} $ git status
On branch {branchName}
Your branch is ahead of 'origin/{branchName}' by 135 commits.
  (use "git push" to publish your local commits)

nothing to commit, working directory clean

$ ~/work/projects/{ProjectName} $ git reset --hard origin/{branchName}
HEAD is now at 6df5719 "Commit message".

$ ~/work/projects/{ProjectName} $ git status
On branch {branchName}
Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/{branchName}.

nothing to commit, working directory clean