How to Undo Checkout in Git

The command git checkout command is used to update the repository to a particular point in the project’s history. When we pass a branch name to it, it switches to the branch where we want the current position.

This command is also used to undo a git add command. The git checkout command does not change the working directory. It only updates the index file and the repository of the current project.

The git checkout command can also be used to restore a file or directory that has been accidentally removed using some git commands. It can also be used to undo a git move to another folder command.

Undo Checkout in Git

For undoing, first, we will execute the below-mentioned command for checking out some particular branch; in our case, we are checking out the master branch.

git checkout master 

If we are not on the master branch, then instead of mentioning master, we will use that branch’s name. If it doesn’t work, we will try the below-mentioned command for a single file in a repository.

git checkout HEAD /path/to/file 

What if we want to execute for the entire repository working copy? We will run the following command to do so.

git reset --hard HEAD

If the command mentioned above does not work either, we will look in the reflog to find our old head SHA and will reset to the following configuration.

git reflog git reset --hard <sha from reflog>

HEAD can be referred to as the name that always points to the recent commit in our current branch.

If we are not on the same branch, it’s the same as our branch head. Or, if we are on the wrong branch, use the name of the branch we meant to be on instead of HEAD.

In other words, HEAD is the name of the latest commit in the branch we are currently working on, and it is already checked out.

git reset --hard HEAD

We can also use the name of a different branch if we want to reset to checkout or reverse the effect of the wrong command from another branch.

Tip: The reflog is like a log of all the SHA-1 values of all the commits we have made to date. We can sometimes use these SHA-1 values to find the SHA-1 value of an old commit that we have moved away from in the last commits.

Tip: If we are on the wrong branch and we want to go back to the branch we were on before, we can do this by using the following Git command:

git checkout <branch we want to switch to