Git in Practice

Chapter 6. Rewriting history and disaster recovery

This chapter covers

• Viewing the history of all changes made to branches over time
• Making a branch point to a previous commit
• Changing the parent of commits to point to another
• Forcing push-rewritten history to a remote repository
• Rewriting the entire history of a branch
• Avoiding losing your work

Technique 4 briefly discussed that Git is capable of rewriting the history of a repository. Because each repository contains the entire history, this ranges from undoing a single commit to rewriting data on every commit in the repository. I make use of rewriting history regularly to ensure that merged branches have a clean, readable history made up of small commits before merging. You can read ...