When working on complex projects, you’ll inevitably encounter situations where you need to undo changes from a specific commit that’s buried several commits back in your history. Recently, I faced this exact scenario when commit 1d814e5 needed to be reverted from our development branch, but it wasn’t the most recent commit. This post explores the safest and most effective ways to handle this situation.

The Challenge

Looking at a typical git reflog, you might see something like this:

Safely Resetting to a Previous Commit in Git

When working with Git, sometimes you need to reset your working tree to a specific commit while preserving the commit history. This guide explains how to do this safely and understand what’s happening behind the scenes.

The Problem

Typically, when developers want to revert to an older commit, they might reach for git reset --hard. However, this can be dangerous as it: