In this post, I will show you how you can recover commits that were deleted with
git reset --hard.
1. Example scenario
Imagine that you have a project with a single branch master that contains 5 commits.
If, for example, you run by mistake git reset --hard HEAD~3, it will drop your last 3 commits and update the master branch pointer.
2. How it works
To recover the commits, you first need to understand that Git didn't delete the
commits. It just won't show them in git log because there isn't anything (like branches, stashes or other commits) pointing to those commits. They are still stored internally in Git (although they will be deleted at some point in the future by Git).
With that in mind, to recover the commits we can just checkout to the "deleted" commit that used to be the tip of master and make the branch point to it again.
3. How to recover the commits
You can recover the commits by running:
$ git reflog - Prints the history of commits visited, including the "deleted"
ones
(copy the SHA of the commit that used to be the tip of "master")
$ git checkout $COMMIT_SHA - Go to the old tip
$ git branch -f master HEAD - Move "master" to the old tip
$ git checkout master
For example, in the scenario described earlier, the commands would display the following:
And that's it! That's how you recover your "deleted" commits after running git reset --HARD.