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I am working on a project using Git as the VCS. I got a branch xyz cut from the mainline branch of master. After working for a while, I committed my code and took a pull of the branch mainline.

The pull was fine. I then merged the code with master. After the merge, there were problems in certain files. I have not committed the code after merging. Can someone please guide as to how I can abort this merge and bring my branch where I am working currently to the state where it was before I merged it?

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  • 1
    Possible duplicate of How to revert Git repository to a previous commit? Commented May 18, 2017 at 13:24
  • Can't you just restore the previous commit of the branch? Commented May 18, 2017 at 13:25
  • 2
    Possible duplicate of How to undo a git merge with conflicts Commented May 18, 2017 at 16:40
  • 1
    Note that in Git, revert is the name of a command that creates a new commit reverting the changes in a previous commit, so that is probably not the word you are looking for here. I have edited your question to clarify. Commented May 18, 2017 at 16:48

4 Answers 4

Reset to default
639

as long as you did not commit you can type

git merge --abort

just as the command line suggested.

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4 Comments

I got this message when trying this: error: Entry 'MyFile.java' not uptodate. Cannot merge. fatal: Could not reset index file to revision 'HEAD'.
@Ahmad git does not start a merge with uncommitted changes (of already tracked files) in place. git cannot protect what it doesn't know.
yeah you are i learnt it by losing my code. here is detail of my problem , how i fell in problem. stackoverflow.com/questions/55474092/how-to-undo-the-git-abort
@SMBiggs When you have a merge conflict you resolved, but added unstaged local changes, it's somewhat odd to see a "Cannot merge." message when you really want to abort the merge. However staging (i.e.: add) the unstaged changes and then git merge -abert woks (git 2.26.2).
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If you do "git status" while having a merge conflict, the first thing git shows you is how to abort the merge.

output of git status while having a merge conflict

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Nice, this suggested me to git reset HEAD <file> which effectively removed the "merge" collapsable from the git extension source control => then I could either resolve the conflicts or just revert my changes in the GIT extension list :)
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Truth be told there are many, many resources explaining how to do this already out on the web:

Git: how to reverse-merge a commit?

Git: how to reverse-merge a commit?

Undoing Merges, from Git's blog (retrieved from archive.org's Wayback Machine)

So I guess I'll just summarize some of these:

  1. git revert <merge commit hash>
    This creates an extra "revert" commit saying you undid a merge

  2. git reset --hard <commit hash *before* the merge>
    This reset history to before you did the merge. If you have commits after the merge you will need to cherry-pick them on to afterwards.

But honestly this guide here is better than anything I can explain, with diagrams! :)

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The link is gone. Sigh.
@ScottBiggs I think they moved it to git-scm.com/book/en/v2/…. Denis, if you read this, can you check? And if it's really the same, can you please update the link in your answer? Thank you!
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If you are using VScode then you can open the Command Palette (Ctrl + Shift + P) and type:

Git: Abort Merge

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