Reset, checkout and revert
The git reset, git checkout, and git revert command are some of the most
useful tools in your Git toolbox. They all let you undo some kind of change in
your repository, and the first two commands can be used to manipulate either
commits or individual files.
Because they’re so similar, it’s very easy to mix up which command should be
used in any given development scenario. In this article, we’ll compare the most
common configurations of git reset, git checkout, and git revert. Hopefully,
you’ll walk away with the confidence to navigate your repository using any of
these commands.
It helps to think about each command in terms of their effect on the three main components of a Git repository: the working directory, the staged snapshot, and the commit history. Keep these components in mind as you read through this article.
Commit-level operations
The parameters that you pass to git reset and git checkout determine their
scope. When you don’t include a file path as a parameter, they operate on whole
commits. That’s what we’ll be exploring in this section. Note that git revert
has no file-level counterpart.
File-level operations
The git reset and git checkout commands also accept an optional file path as
a parameter. This dramatically alters their behavior. Instead of operating on
entire snapshots, this forces them to limit their operations to a single file.