Undo git merge to remote branch

Question

So long story short I had a remote branch I was working on (my-remote-branch) that was failing some tests in the CI. I was told to rebase to master to fix this issue.

I did the following:

git checkout master
git pull
git checkout my-remote-branch
git rebase master
git push

At that point I got an error:

 hint: Updates were rejected because the tip of your current branch is behind
 hint: its remote counterpart. Integrate the remote changes (e.g.
 hint: 'git pull ...') before pushing again.

So next I did:

 git pull --set-upstream-origin my-remote-branch
 git push

This kind of just created a mess. My pull request now has a massive amount of commits (all the ones from master) so the history is all messed up and there's a misleading number of changed files for the pull request. This seems more complicated than a simple revert since I can't just revert back to one commit, all the commits are intertwined from master.

Apparently what I was supposed to do was this:

 git fetch origin master
 git rebase -I origin/master
 git push —force

Is there a way I can undo my mistake (undo the merge, remove commits from history in my branch only) so I can execute the step I was supposed to do?

Answer 1

you can undo the last commit with

git checkout my-remote-branch
git reset --hard HEAD~1

source

if the last commit wasn't the "bad" one, then you can use git log to find the last hash of the last good commit an then do

git reset --hard HASH

(replace HASH with the repective hash).

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after that you are back where you started and can do what you think would have been correct.