How to remove commits from a pull request

I did a pull request but after that I made some commits to the project locally which ended polluting my pull request, I tried to remove it but without any luck.

I found some similar questions on StackOverflow but I can't apply what's in there. It's my first pull request on GitHub so it's kinda strange to me how all of this works.

The highlighted commit is the one I need to keep and remove all the other stuff. It becomes the fourth commit in the history because I make some merge stuff.

my git log

Can someone please explain what's going on and how to fix this problem?

People wouldn't like to see a wrong commit and a revert commit to undo changes of the wrong commit. This pollutes commit history.

Here is a simple way for removing the wrong commit instead of undoing changes with a revert commit.

0. git checkout my-pull-request-branch

1. git rebase -i HEAD~n // where n is the number of last commits you want to include in interactive rebase.

2. Replace pick with drop for commits you want to discard.

3. Save and exit.

4. git push --force

You have several techniques to do it.

This post - read the part about the revert will explain in details what we want to do and how to do it.

Here is the most simple solution to your problem:

# Checkout the desired branch
git checkout <branch>

# Undo the desired commit
git revert <commit>

# Update the remote with the undo of the code
git push origin <branch>

The revert command will create a new commit with the undo of the original commit.

If you're removing a commit and don't want to keep its changes @ferit has a good solution.

If you want to add that commit to the current branch, but doesn't make sense to be part of the current pr, you can do the following instead:

1. use git rebase -i HEAD~n
2. Swap the commit you want to remove to the bottom (most recent) position
3. Save and exit
4. use git reset HEAD^ --soft to uncommit the changes and get them back in a staged state.
5. use git push --force to update the remote branch without your removed commit.

Now you'll have removed the commit from your remote, but will still have the changes locally.

So do the following ,

Lets say your branch name is my_branch and this has the extra commits.

1. git checkout -b my_branch_with_extra_commits (Keeping this branch saved under a different name)
2. gitk (Opens git console)
3. Look for the commit you want to keep. Copy the SHA of that commit to a notepad.
4. git checkout my_branch
5. gitk (This will open the git console )
6. Right click on the commit you want to revert to (State before your changes) and click on "reset branch to here"
7. Do a git pull --rebase origin branch_name_to _merge_to
8. git cherry-pick <SHA you copied in step 3. >

Now look at the local branch commit history and make sure everything looks good.

This is what helped me:

1. Create a new branch with the existing one. Let's call the existing one branch_old and new as branch_new.

2. Reset branch_new to a stable state, when you did not have any problem commit at all. For example, to put it at your local master's level do the following:

   git reset —hard master git push —force origin

3. cherry-pick the commits from branch_old into branch_new

4. git push