Undo Git Commit Amend So You Can Make a Separate Commit
This can be helpful to break apart 2 commits so you can go back and make a separate commit with your latest changes.
If I’ve been doing a few git commit --amend --no-edit commands sometimes my
brain goes into auto-complete mode and will add --amend --no-edit out of
habit on my next commit.
Of course this is a problem when you want to create a separate commit, otherwise if you amend a commit then the changes will be rolled into your most recent commit instead of making a new one. Oops!
Thankfully it’s super easy to undo things in a way where whatever you amended will be separated out of your latest commit and be staged for commit:
# If you get an error in your shell, try wrapping HEAD@{1} in quotes.
git reset --soft HEAD@{1}
As always if you’re rewriting history, this is a thing to do before you push your code!
There’s a difference between HEAD~1 and HEAD@{1} and neither are specific
to --amend.
If we used ~1 it would have completely undid the previous commit so now you
would be left having to re-do that commit and also the new commit you want
afterwards. Instead, @{1} will keep that previous commit and automatically
stage your amended changes so you can commit it separately. The
docs
go into more detail about HEAD@{1}.
There are other use cases for HEAD@{1} but it’s my new goto trick for undoing
an amend.
I had this happen to me recently when I was making changes to my Dockerized Rails starter app and I amended adding Hotwire Spark into the same commit where I replaced Sprockets with Propshaft. These are separate things, so the above command helped resolve that.
The video below demos how this works in a git repo.
# Demo Video
Timestamps
- 0:23 – Showing the problem
- 1:07 – Solving this in an inefficient way
- 2:28 – Solving it in a better way
- 3:23 – Taking a look at reflog and the differences between the 2
When was the last time you had to do this? Let me know below.