Revert a Merge
If you are in the middle of a merge - the merge has not been commited and there are merge conflicts that are being resolved. The merge can be aborted with:
git merge --abort
Have not tried this
If you merge a branch into another, eg:
git checkout integration
git merge my-feature-branch
Then you check how it looks in git using git log:
commit 02b1e83ee7c695d8227ba40a68c1c9ef8b7290ce (HEAD -> integration)
Merge: 8d36df0 c0b893a
Author: surfer190
Date: Mon May 15 11:12:29 2023 +0200
Merge branch 'my-feature-branch' into integration
As you can see this commit has 2 parents:
Merge: 8d36df0 c0b893a
if the form:
Merge: parent1 parent2
If you scroll down in git log the 2 parent commits may be highlighted a different colour
In reverting a merge one cannot just do:
git revert 02b1e83ee
The form:
git revert <merge-commit>
An error wil arise:
$ git revert 02b1e83e
error: commit 02b1e83ee7c695d8227ba40a68c1c9ef8b7290ce is a merge but no -m option was given.
fatal: revert failed
Soyou need to think about which parent the merge should revert to. In this case it is parent 1:
git revert 02b1e83e -m 1
This will revert the merge and write it to git history.
This is the case when the change has already been pushed to the remote.
If the merge has not been pushed to the remote yet, one can just reset the branch back to where it was with:
git reset --hard origin/<branch-name>
or
git reset --hard commit_sha
History#
There is some interesting history and explaination of this from Linus Torvalds: git documentation: how to revert a faulty merge