Git Tutorial - Discarding Changes and Unstaging

Note

This section assumes you have:

completed the Git Tutorial - Working with Remote Repositories section of the tutorial,
opened a terminal window that is connected to one of the CS Linux servers, and
navigated to your git-tutorial directory.

In the Git Tutorial - Working with Remote Repositories section, we covered how to link a local repository to a remote repository on GitHub. In this section, you will learn how to discard changes.

One of the benefits of using a version control system is that it is very easy to inspect the history of changes to a given file, as well as to undo changes we did not intend to make.

For example, edit README.md to remove all its contents.

git status will tell us this:

On branch main
Your branch is up to date with 'origin/main'.

Changes not staged for commit:
  (use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
  (use "git restore <file>..." to discard changes in working directory)
        modified:   README.md

no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")

If we want to discard the changes we made to README.md, all we have to do is follow the helpful advice provided by the above output:

$ git restore README.md

If you look at README.md, you’ll see that its contents have been magically restored!

Now, edit README.md to add an additional line with the text UChicago Student Resource Guide. Run git add -u but don’t commit it just yet. The git status will show this:

On branch main
Your branch is up to date with 'origin/main'.

Changes to be committed:
  (use "git restore --staged <file>..." to unstage)
        modified:   README.md

Now, let’s say we realized do not want to commit the changes to README.md, but we’ve already told git that we want to include README.md in the commit. Fortunately, we can “un-include” it (or “unstage” it, in Git lingo) by running this command:

$ git restore --staged README.md

Now, git status will show the following:

On branch main
Your branch is up to date with 'origin/main'.

Changes not staged for commit:
  (use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
  (use "git restore <file>..." to discard changes in working directory)
        modified:   README.md

no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")

We can either commit the changes or restore the file back to the last commit (using git restore). Let’s commit and push the changes:

$ git add -u
$ git commit -m"Wrapping up the restore section of the tutorial"
$ git push

Before continuing, make sure git status shows this:

On branch main
Your branch is up to date with 'origin/main'.

nothing to commit, working tree clean

In the next section, you will learn how to view your commit log.