Undo a fast-forward git merge

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A friend has a fork of my project and sent me a pull-request. Without doing any eyeballing at all, I did this:

$ git fetch XXX
$ git merge XXX/master

Git ran a fast-forward merge and now all those commits are in my code. Then I ran some tests and KABOOM.

After spending a while digging around and seeing just how much needed to be fixed, I decided that it would be better to just send an email with the test errors back to my friend rather than try to fix them myself. I got my own work to do, after all.

So I sent the email, but now I had a git checkout with all those commits.

And since this was a fast-forward merge, git didn’t create a commit for the merge.

Incidentally, today I learned that you can force git to make an explicit commit for fast-forward merges like this:

$ git merge --no-ff XXX/master

I went to #git on irc.freenode.org, where I always go, and I explained the situation, and then was told to do these commands:

$ git reflog show master
$ git reset --keep master@{1}

And it worked! All the foreign commits are now gone.

But what just happened?

I’m not absolutely certain, but it seems like the git reflog show master command shows the changes applied to HEAD over time. This is what the top lines showed for me:

cce8252 master@{0}: merge XXX/master: Fast-forward
08c8f50 master@{1}: commit: Cleaning up the my-account pages
5526212 master@{2}: commit: Deleted a handler that was never getting used

This is different than git log. This is talking about the state of my local master branch over time.

Then, the next command git reset –keep master@{1} is telling git to reset the checkout to look like what master looked like one state in the past.

Like I said, I’m still not sure I understand this, but I plan to study it more.

13 thoughts on “Undo a fast-forward git merge”

  1. Matt,

    Hope you are well. Great collection of posts on this blog.

    Off topic, I thought you might be interested in this website pinterest.com, which utilizes Python. (One of the site's cofounders is a former coworker of mine.)

    Best regards to you and your family,
    Nick

  2. Hey Nick!

    So good to hear from you.

    pinterest is going to be freakin' huge. I know that because several women I know all are obsessed with it, and none of them know each other.

    What are you up to these days? Let's catch up.

    Matt

  10. for newbies like me who could not find the .gitconfig file, here is the Git Bash command equivalent:

    git config –global merge.ff false

    Thanks!!

  11. sweet jesus. I know that git “never looses your data” but I couldn’t find it for the life of me. this command showed me just the right commit to reset to. Thanks.

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