git revert

The safe way to back out a change that's already public.

🎯 What & why

Create a new commit that undoes the changes of a previous one. The history is preserved; the cancellation is appended. The right tool when you need to back out a change that's already been pushed.

🧠 Mental model

Revert computes the reverse diff of <commit> and applies it on top of HEAD as a new commit. The original commit stays in history. Reverting a merge requires -m <parent-number> because Git doesn't know which side to consider the 'mainline.'

🛠️ Synopsis

git revert [--[no-]edit] [-n] [-m parent-number] [-s] [-S[<keyid>]] <commit>...
git revert (--continue | --skip | --abort | --quit)

🎚️ Switches & options

Flag	What it does
`-n, --no-commit`	Stage the reverse change without creating the commit. Useful when reverting multiple commits as one.
`-m <n>`	Specify mainline parent for reverting a merge. `-m 1` is usually what you want.
`--no-edit`	Use the auto-generated commit message without launching the editor.
`-s, --signoff`	Append `Signed-off-by:` trailer.

💡 Use cases

Backing out a change that's already public (the safe alternative to reset + force-push).
Walking a release branch back from a buggy merge.
Reverting in bulk before redoing a feature differently.

🧪 Examples

Revert a single commit.

$ git revert <sha>

Revert a range without committing each one.

$ git revert -n abc..def && git commit -m 'revert range abc..def'

Revert a merge commit (mainline = first parent).

$ git revert -m 1 <merge-sha>

🎓 Recommendations

On shared branches, revert over reset. Always.
If you revert a merge and later want to bring those changes back, you can't just re-merge — you'll need to revert the revert, or rebase. Plan before pulling the trigger.

🪤 Common pitfalls

Reverting a merge (-m 1) effectively kills future merges from that branch — the revert says 'these changes don't belong here'. Re-introducing them requires revert <revert-sha>.
Conflicts during revert behave like conflicts during merge: resolve, git revert --continue.

🔗 Related modules

📝 Quiz

Hit each option, then Check answers. Score is recorded; Next is always open.