Is there any way to delete local commits in Mercurial?

Question

So I keep making a silly mistake in Mercurial. Often times, I'll start work without doing an "hg pull" and an "hg update." When I try to push my changes, I get an error.

Is there any way to delete my local commits so I can avoid creating multiple heads, branches, etc? I just want to delete my local commits, merge my changes with the tip, and then re-commit. Sounds simple, right? I can't seem to find any way to easily delete local commits so I can cleanly merge with the tip.

Again, I'm only trying to delete local commits made with "hg ci". I don't want to modify files, revert, etc.

Solution 1

Enable the "strip" extension and type the following:

hg strip #changeset# --keep

Where #changeset# is the hash for the changeset you want to remove. This will remove the said changeset including changesets that descend from it and will leave your working directory untouched. If you wish to also revert your committed code changes remove the --keep option.

For more information, check the Strip Extension.

If you get "unkown command 'strip'" you may need to enable it. To do so find the .hgrc or Mercurial.ini file and add the following to it:

[extensions]
strip =

---

Note that (as Juozas mentioned in his comment) having multiple heads is normal workflow in Mercurial. You should not use the strip command to battle that. Instead, you should merge your head with the incoming head, resolve any conflicts, test, and then push.

The strip command is useful when you really want to get rid of changesets that pollute the branch. In fact, if you're in this question's situation and you want to completely remove all "draft" change sets permanently, check out the top answer, which basically suggests doing:

hg strip 'roots(outgoing())'

Solution 2

If you are using Hg Tortoise just activate the extension "strip" in:

1. File/Settings/Extensions/
2. Select strip

Then select the bottom revision from where you want to start striping, by doing right click on it, and selecting:

1. Modify history
2. Strip

Just like this:

In this example it will erase from the 19th revision to the last one commited(22).

Solution 3

Modern answer (only relevant after Mercurial 2.1):

Use Phases and mark the revision(s) that you don't want to share as secret (private). That way when you push they won't get sent.

In TortoiseHG you can right click on a commit to change its phase.

Also: You can also use the extension "rebase" to move your local commits to the head of the shared repository after you pull.

Solution 4

As everyone else is pointing out you should probably just pull and then merge the heads, but if you really want to get rid of your commits without any of the EditingHistory tools then you can just hg clone -r your repo to get all but those changes.

This doesn't delete them from the original repository, but it creates a new clone that doesn't have them. Then you can delete the repo you modified (if you'd like).

Solution 5

I came across this problem too. I made 2 commit and wanted to rollback and delete both commits.

$ hg rollback

But hg rollback just rolls back to the last commit, not the 2 commits. At that time I did not realize this and I changed the code.

When I found hg rollback had just rolled back one commit, I found I could use hg strip #changeset#. So, I used hg log -l 10 to find the latest 10 commits and get the right changeset I wanted to strip.

$ hg log -l 10
changeset:   2499:81a7a8f7a5cd
branch:      component_engine
tag:         tip
user:        myname<[email protected]>
date:        Fri Aug 14 12:22:02 2015 +0800
summary:     get runs from sandbox

changeset:   2498:9e3e1de76127
branch:      component_engine
user:        other_user_name<[email protected]>
date:        Mon Aug 03 09:50:18 2015 +0800
summary:     Set current destination to a copy incoming exchange

......

$ hg strip 2499
abort: local changes found

What does abort: local changes found mean? It means that hg found changes to the code that haven't been committed yet. So, to solve this, you should hg diff to save the code you have changed and hg revert and hg strip #changeset#. Just like this:

$ hg diff > /PATH/TO/SAVE/YOUR/DIFF/FILE/my.diff
$ hg revert file_you_have_changed
$ hg strip #changeset#

After you have done the above, you can patch the diff file and your code can be added back to your project.

$ patch -p1 < /PATH/TO/SAVE/YOUR/DIFF/FILE/my.diff

View more solutions

Comments

[Pogramming]

Does "hg clone -r" delete local changes? I just want to delete local commits to keep things simple.

[Ry4an Brase]

It doesn't delete them from the cloned repository, but it creates a new clone that doesn't have them. Then you can delete the repo you modified if you'd like.

[Samaursa]

@Bharath: You need to enable the extension

[dyatchenko]

File/Settings/Extensions/ I wish I could add more votes. Thank you very much!

[Tim Tisdall]

Argh! I tried this but it seemed to dump all my changes despite not checking off "no backup" or "discard local changes". I wanted to keep those changes, just not commit them! Is there any way to recover them now??

[Tim Tisdall]

I can't seem to find a way to do it properly, but it seems like to keep the content you need to pass --keep and TortoiseHg doesn't give that option. So... you need to do it at the command line with hg strip -r . --keep.

[Tim Tisdall]

from strip help: 'Any stripped changesets are stored in ".hg/strip-backup" as a bundle (see "hg help bundle" and "hg help unbundle"). They can be restored by running "hg unbundle .hg/strip-backup/BUNDLE", where BUNDLE is the bundle file created by the strip.'

[Chih-Hsuan Yen]

Since mercurial 2.8, strip is a standalone extension, so just strip = is fine. WhatsNew for Mercurial 2.8

[Ponomarenko Oleh]

In the SourceTree it was useful too. Thanks!

[Bill Keller]

Double check the inclusion of an image.