I ran into a situation when I wrongly pushed some commits onto a repository.

Hence I need to remove those commits.

The exact situation is all because I didn’t fully understand Octopress.. I was using Octopress on GitHub Pages.

Usually, you will only be on source branch. When you want to push to the master branch, you use the rake gen_deploy command, which will generate the static files to _deploy directory, which will then automatically push _deploy onto GitHub.

I have itchy hands..

And switched to the master branch..

And there I somehow made 2 commits, and pushed them.

After going back to source branch, subsequent rake gen_deploy will give this error:

failed to push some refs to '[email protected]:samwize/samwize.github.com'

I don’t really understand why.

But I knew I shouldn’t push the 2 commits in the first place.

Steps to remove the 2 commits

Firstly, find out the comit that you want to revert back to.

git log

For example, commit 7f6d03 was before the 2 wrongful commits.

Force push that commit as the new master:

git push origin +7f6d03:master

The + is interpreted as forced push.

Another way

You can also use git reset to undo things. Then force push.

git reset 7f6d03 --hard
git push origin -f