Committed to the Wrong Git Branch? Move Your Commits

Start in move-lab. git status --short should print nothing: there are no uncommitted changes to protect. git branch --show-current confirms main. The log range origin/main..HEAD lists commits reachable from your current tip but not from the local origin/main tracking reference.

Here you should see Add tax rule and Add checkout note. The setup pushed the initial commit before creating those two, so the tracking reference gives us the intended baseline. In a real project, fetch first and confirm which branch is the correct base. A tracking reference can be stale; a local log comparison does not prove that nobody else has received the commits by another route.

If status shows work in progress, preserve it before any hard reset. A temporary commit on a separate branch or a deliberate stash can help, but understand what is included: ordinary stash behavior does not automatically cover every untracked or ignored file. The clean VM example avoids that additional recovery problem.

Also inspect the selected commits. You may need only the last commit, rather than everything after origin/main. The next card deliberately moves both commits; choose a different baseline in a real repository only after identifying the intended range.

cd /home/student/move-lab

git status --short

git branch --show-current

git log --oneline origin/main..HEAD

Create feature/checkout while main still points at the two new commits. git branch creates the name without switching branches, so the following reset still applies to main. Only after main returns to origin/main do we switch to the feature branch and inspect its log.

The order matters. Saving the branch first gives the commits an explicit home. The hard reset resets main's tip, index and tracked working-tree contents to the selected baseline. It can discard uncommitted work, which is why the clean-status check came before it. It can also remove untracked paths that obstruct checkout of tracked paths.

Once you switch to feature/checkout, checkout.txt and tax.txt are present again because that branch points to the commit containing them. Nothing was copied between branches. The branch names now reach different snapshots of the same repository.

Use a new branch name for this recipe. If the intended destination already exists, switch to it and use cherry-pick to apply the selected commits, then inspect the result before cleaning up the mistaken branch. Do not replace an existing branch tip simply to make it match a tutorial. Conflicts during cherry-pick require inspection; you can abort that operation if it is not the move you intended.

cd /home/student/move-lab

git branch feature/checkout

git reset --hard origin/main

git switch feature/checkout

git log --oneline origin/main..HEAD

cat checkout.txt tax.txt

The independent shared-lab repository represents the other case. Its accidental Add shared checkout note commit already exists on the bare remote's main branch. Save a feature branch at that commit, then use revert on main to create a new commit reversing its change. Push that new commit normally.

The log now contains both the accidental commit and the revert. That is intentional: existing consumers can advance through ordinary history instead of reconciling a rewritten main. The feature branch still points to the snapshot with checkout.txt, while main no longer contains that file.

Our local remote has no branch-protection rules. On a protected main branch, perform the revert on a cleanup branch and submit it through the project's normal review process. Reverting multiple commits or a merge needs additional care; this card reverses one simple, independent commit only.

Saving the original commit on a feature branch preserves the work, but does not make a later pull request automatically reapply it: main already contains that original commit in its ancestry. To reintroduce the change later, make fresh commits on a branch from the corrected main, or deliberately revert the revert through review. Do not force-push shared main just to make its graph look tidier.

cd /home/student/shared-lab

git branch feature/shared-checkout

git revert --no-edit HEAD

git push origin main

git log --oneline -3