Revert to a commit by a SHA hash in Git?

I'm not clear on how git revert works. For example, I want to revert to a commit six commits behind the head, reverting all the changes in the intermediary commits in between.

Say its SHA hash is 56e05fced214c44a37759efa2dfc25a65d8ae98d. Then why can't I just do something like:

git revert 56e05fced214c44a37759efa2dfc25a65d8ae98d

If you want to commit on top of the current HEAD with the exact state at a different commit, undoing all the intermediate commits, then you can use reset to create the correct state of the index to make the commit.

# Reset the index and working tree to the desired tree
# Ensure you have no uncommitted changes that you want to keep
git reset --hard 56e05fced

# Move the branch pointer back to the previous HEAD
git reset --soft "HEAD@{1}"

git commit -m "Revert to 56e05fced"

What [git-revert][] does is create a commit which undoes changes made in a given commit, creating a commit which is reverse (well, reciprocal) of a given commit. Therefore

git revert <SHA-1>

should and does work.

If you want to rewind back to a specified commit, and you can do this because this part of history was not yet published, you need to use [git-reset][], not git-revert:

git reset --hard <SHA-1>

(Note that --hard would make you lose any non-committed changes in the working directory).

Additional Notes

By the way, perhaps it is not obvious, but everywhere where documentation says <commit> or <commit-ish> (or <object>), you can put an SHA-1 identifier (full or shortened) of commit.

[git-revert]: http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-revert.html "git-revert(1) Manual Page - Revert an existing commit" [git-reset]: http://git-scm.com/docs/git-reset "git-reset(1) Manual Page - Reset current HEAD to the specified state"

It reverts the said commit, that is, adds the commit opposite to it. If you want to checkout an earlier revision, you do:

git checkout 56e05fced214c44a37759efa2dfc25a65d8ae98d

The best way to rollback to a specific commit is:

git reset --hard <commit-id>

Then:

git push <reponame> -f

If your changes have already been pushed to a public, shared remote, and you want to revert all commits between HEAD and <sha-id>, then you can pass a commit range to git revert,

git revert 56e05f..HEAD

and it will revert all commits between 56e05f and HEAD (excluding the start point of the range, 56e05f).

Updated:

If there were no merge commits in between, this answer provides a is simpler method: https://stackoverflow.com/a/21718540/541862

But if there was one or more merge commits, that answer won't work, so stick to this one (that works in all cases).

Original answer:

# Create a backup of master branch
git branch backup_master

# Point master to '56e05fce' and
# make working directory the same with '56e05fce'
git reset --hard 56e05fce

# Point master back to 'backup_master' and
# leave working directory the same with '56e05fce'.
git reset --soft backup_master

# Now working directory is the same '56e05fce' and
# master points to the original revision. Then we create a commit.
git commit -a -m "Revert to 56e05fce"

# Delete unused branch
git branch -d backup_master

The two commands git reset --hard and git reset --soft are magic here. The first one changes the working directory, but it also changes head (the current branch) too. We fix the head by the second one.

This is more understandable:

git checkout 56e05fced -- .
git add .
git commit -m 'Revert to 56e05fced'

And to prove that it worked:

git diff 56e05fced

Should be as simple as:

git reset --hard 56e05f

That'll get you back to that specific point in time.

This might work:

git checkout 56e05f
echo ref: refs/heads/master > .git/HEAD
git commit