Undo a merge by pull request?

git github merge pull-request
Will picture Will · Jun 26, 2011 · Viewed 197.3k times · Source

Someone accepted a pull request which they shouldn't have. Now we have a bunch of broken code merged in. How do you undo a pull request? I was just going to revert the changes to the commit just before the merge, but I noticed that it merged in a bunch of commits. So now there are all these commits from this person from days before the merge. How do you undo this?

Answer

errordeveloper picture errordeveloper · Apr 30, 2013

There is a better answer to this problem, though I could just break this down step-by-step.

You will need to fetch and checkout the latest upstream changes like so, e.g.:

git fetch upstream
git checkout upstream/master -b revert/john/foo_and_bar

Taking a look at the commit log, you should find something similar to this:

commit b76a5f1f5d3b323679e466a1a1d5f93c8828b269
Merge: 9271e6e a507888
Author: Tim Tom <[email protected]>
Date:   Mon Apr 29 06:12:38 2013 -0700

    Merge pull request #123 from john/foo_and_bar

    Add foo and bar

commit a507888e9fcc9e08b658c0b25414d1aeb1eef45e
Author: John Doe <[email protected]>
Date:   Mon Apr 29 12:13:29 2013 +0000

    Add bar

commit 470ee0f407198057d5cb1d6427bb8371eab6157e
Author: John Doe <[email protected]>
Date:   Mon Apr 29 10:29:10 2013 +0000

    Add foo

Now you want to revert the entire pull request with the ability to unrevert later. To do so, you will need to take the ID of the merge commit.

In the above example the merge commit is the top one where it says "Merged pull request #123...".

Do this to revert the both changes ("Add bar" and "Add foo") and you will end up with in one commit reverting the entire pull request which you can unrevert later on and keep the history of changes clean:

git revert -m 1 b76a5f1f5d3b323679e466a1a1d5f93c8828b269

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