从分支中删除提交

Question

I am working on a React project that uses gh-pages to deploy a website. I accidentally merged my master branch with my gh-pages branch and brought all of the changes that were on master to gh-pages . In total, it added 24 commits to my gh-pages branch that weren't there before.

I was wondering if there was a way to revert these changes and to take my gh-pages branch back to the 6 commits that were there to begin with?

If that is possible, is there a way to remove those 24 extra commits on the gh-pages branch from GitHub?

I have looked at resources related to git reset --hard and git rebase and I am unsure if they would solve my problem. I don't want to destroy the git structure of this project more than it already is.

Answer 1

The safest thing to do is to git revert the merge commit you made by accident. By doing a git revert it should be noted that you are adding a new commit which functionally undoes the merge commit from master which you did by accident. Here is how to do this:

# from gh-pages
git log

# find the SHA-a of the merge commit, and then do
git revert -m 1 <merge commit hash>

Note that you probably want -m 1 here, which tells Git to revert back to the first parent, which typically would be your gh-pages feature branch.

Note that doing a revert commit here is preferable to trying to cut out the merge commit. The reason for this is that actually removing the merge commit means rewriting history, which can cause trouble for anyone else using your gh-pages branch.