Revert – Undo the changes introduced by a commit

Revert can be used to undo a commit in history that has already been published (pushed), whereas this can't be done with the amend or reset options without rewriting history.

Revert works by applying the anti-patch introduced by the commit in question. A revert will, by default, create a new commit in history with a commit message that describes which commit has been reverted.

Getting ready

Again, we'll use the hello worldrepository. Make a fresh clone of the repository, or reset themaster branch if you have already cloned one.

We can create a fresh clone as follows:

$ git clone https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Git-Version-Control-Cookbook-Second-Edition_hello_world_cookbook.git 
$ cd Git-Version-Control-Cookbook-Second-Edition_hello_world_cookbook

We can reset the existing clone as follows:

$ cd Git-Version-Control-Cookbook-Second-Edition_hello_world_cookbook
$ git checkout master 
$ git reset --hard origin/master 
HEAD is now at 3061dc6 Adds...