How to undo a git pull

Have you ever been working on a project, ran a git pull only to realise you've majorly messed up? Now all your code has been overwritten with whatever was in your remote repository - and sometimes this isn't what you want. In times like this, it's easy to panic, but fortunately there are a few ways to revert your code back to its old state and undo the git pull.

First things first, make a copy of your project in case you cause things to get worse. Also note that these commands will cause you to lose all uncomitted changes - so a backup can help you save that stuff before you continue. At least then, you'll have the version you currently have. After you've done this backup, you'll want to get a list of all your commit history. You can do this by running git reflog:

git reflog

This will generate a list that looks like this:

648e314 (HEAD -> master, origin/master) HEAD@{0}: commit: Design refresh
b0168ee HEAD@{1}: commit: Minor CSS tweaks
514a02f HEAD@{2}: commit: Fixed extra curly brace
b432ba7 HEAD@{3}: commit: fixed border-radius
a707d13 HEAD@{4}: commit: fixed image border-radius
abf89a3 HEAD@{5}: commit: updated look and feel

Select the version you want to revert to. For example, if I wanted to revert to 'Minor CSS tweaks', I'd select the ID b0168ee. Next, run the following command to revert your repository to that verson:

git reset --hard b0168ee

This is quite easy, and gives you a lot of control over which version you recover. However, another easier way to do this is to give a time. If you don't want to run git reflog, you can run the following command to revert to the version of your repository as it was 30 mins ago, assuming your branch is master. Note, if you have been working on a specific branch for a long time, this may revert you back quite far. In that case, you might be better using the previous method - but you should be fine if you have a backup. 😄

git reset --hard master@{"30 minutes ago"}