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Sometimes, you check out a repo, happily working along, and then just screw your files up badly. Let's do that.

Commands you'll learn#

In this tutorial you'll be using the following commands: * git checkout: Take a snapshot (commit) and make your working directory look like it.

I Just Want To Go Back#

  1. Learner A, B, and C: Go to your 'soup' repo from the previous exercise. Just to be sure that everybody is up to date, everybody should call git pull. You can also have a look at your git log; they should all look the same.

  2. Learner A, B, and C: Individually, do something bad to your local files (only in the repo, of course!). Delete the ingredients.md, or delete lines in one of the files, and then save them. Learner B! Do not delete your sauce.secret! It has never been committed, so you cannot get it back!

  3. Learner A, B, and C: Now, again individually, you decide that those working changes were really not great, and you want to restore the last commit. There are several ways of doing this in git. Say git status - it will recommend one possible way.

  4. Learner A, B, and C: As git status tells you, you can use git checkout -- <filename> to discard your working changes. If you call git checkout -- ., you will discard all your working changes in your current directory, and thus be thrown back to the last commit. Be super careful. This discards your working changes. They will be lost. (If you feel like it, google git stash at this point if you would like to back up your working changes, just to be safe.)

  5. Learner A, B, and C: What do you do if you have committed changes that you would like to undo? That is, if you want to go back to a commit far back in time? There are really neat ways of doing this in git, even if you have already pushed (shared) your newer commits to GitHub. Cliffhanger: You will learn about this in the git branching tutorial. (git revert and git reset is where it's at.)

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