Reverting an interactive git rebase

Question

After completing a feature branch, during a git rebase -i I accidentally removed all my commits. I'm not completely sure but I suspect that instead of squashing my commits, I replaced the entire entry with a commit message.

http://shafiulazam.com/gitbook/4_interactive_rebasing.html says:

The last useful thing that interactive rebase can do is drop commits for you. If instead of choosing 'pick', 'squash' or 'edit' for the commit line, you simply remove the line, it will remove the commit from the history.

My question is: is there a way to revert/undo this?

Solution 1

If you have just done the rebase, you can try as mentioned here:

git reset --hard ORIG_HEAD

as Jakub Narębski details:

ORIG_HEAD is previous state of HEAD, set by commands that have possibly dangerous behavior, to be easy to revert them.
It is less useful now that Git has reflog: HEAD@{1} is roughly equivalent to ORIG_HEAD (HEAD@{1} is always last value of HEAD, ORIG_HEAD is last value of HEAD before dangerous operation).

If you have executed some operations since the rebase, the reflog can still help.

Solution 2

You can do "git reflog" and get back your old HEAD.

Comments

[Zubin]

Thanks VonC - git reflog was the key.

[Alfredo Gallegos]

Pretty much a lifesaver, this really saved my butt.