When to Reset, Restore or Revert

Git has three undo commands and they are not interchangeable. restore touches uncommitted work, reset moves your own branch, and revert undoes a commit that other people may already have. Picking by what you are undoing - and who has seen it - keeps undo boring.

Restore: uncommitted work#

You edited a file and the change is wrong. It is not staged, not committed:

git restore app/Models/Invoice.php

Staged it by accident but still want to edit? Unstage without losing the edit:

git restore --staged app/Models/Invoice.php

Restore only reaches work that exists in some committed form. An edit to a file that was never committed anywhere is gone for good once restored away.

Reset: commits nobody else has#

You committed on your branch, have not pushed, and want those commits back as working changes:

git reset --soft HEAD~1    # undo the commit, keep everything staged
git reset HEAD~1           # undo the commit, keep the changes unstaged
git reset --hard HEAD~1    # undo the commit and throw the changes away

Reset rewrites the branch, so it belongs to history only you have seen. If a commit is already on the shared remote, reset is how you end up force-pushing over a teammate’s work.

Revert: commits everyone has#

A commit is on main, the deploy from it broke invoices, and the team has pulled it:

git revert 3e39e4f

Revert adds a new commit that applies the inverse diff. History keeps growing forward, nobody re-pulls a rewritten branch, and git revert of the revert brings the change back when the fix is ready. On a Laravel app this pairs cleanly with rollback: revert the commit, run php artisan migrate:rollback if it carried a migration, deploy again.

The rule of thumb#

• Not committed: restore.
• Committed, not pushed: reset.
• Pushed: revert.

When the mistake is bigger than one commit - a wrong rebase, a reset too far - the reflog remembers where the branch was before any of it. And when you are about to undo something you are not sure about, git branch rescue first: a branch you delete after inspecting costs nothing.