Undo the Undo -- A Short Tale of a Git Mistake

I had one of those "Oh shit, Git!" moments this past weekend...

Mine was that I made a necessary change, and since it was pretty minor (really a typo fix of sorts) I just went ahead and did it in the main branch. NBD. Commit, push, and pull on the remote host, and all is good.

Except I have a big feature dev branch in parallel and I need to pull this minor fix into it. Normally this is not a big deal, because I'd have done separate dev in another feature branch and merge it in as well...but this time it was done in main and I got confused/sidetracked by the (normally helpful) output in Git Graph.

Long story short, I ended up doing some combination of rebase, merge, and revert. Not in that order. It was a dark time, and ultimately/somehow in my related panic I managed to push this up to github on the main branch (and subsequently pulled it into production).

At this point I would normally crawl in a hole. Ugh. But for Future Me's sake, I write this as a reminder.

Time for the Big Guns

I have now dug quite the hole. Production is broken, and I have some weird-ass gnarled mess between the local branches. Time to make some HARD choices.

I've managed to wrap my head around how I really want this to work out, so first off is to fix main (and subsequently production).

On the main branch, locally (and then remote):

• git reset [last good commit hash]
• [Re-]Make fixes, commit
• git push -f origin main
• git pull (remote)
• git reset --hard [new origin/HEAD hash] (remote)

Production and main are now fixed. Woohoo!

Switch over to the feature dev branch:

• git merge main
• Double-check the desired changed stuff from main is present

Relax, It's Fixed!

Git Graph (a super useful VSCode plugin if you're not already using it) verifies what I expect, and all is now well. Time to relax.

I don't know why I thought rebase would be the right move here, other than getting temporarily confused by the graph lines in Git Graph (combined with the disparate branches). I knew better than this, but clearly I'm a little out of practice on things.

And this, kids, is why you do dev work (minor as it may be) in separate branches from your primary (or main/production). The mere presence of the other branch would've easily made my mind click in the proper way.

Ah well, it's fixed now. Time for a beer!