How to undo a rebase in Git
Łukasz Holeczek
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Undoing a problematic rebase is crucial when Git operations go wrong and you need to restore your previous commit history safely.
As the creator of CoreUI with over 25 years of development experience managing Git repositories since the early 2000s, I’ve had to undo rebases numerous times when conflicts became too complex or the rebase result wasn’t what was intended.
The most reliable approach is using git reflog to find the commit before the rebase and git reset --hard to restore that state.
This method provides a complete recovery mechanism that restores your branch to exactly how it was before the rebase operation.
Use git reflog to find the commit before rebase and git reset --hard to restore your previous state.
# View the reflog to find the commit before rebase
git reflog
# Reset to the commit before rebase (replace HEAD@{1} with your specific entry)
git reset --hard HEAD@{1}
# Alternative: reset to a specific commit SHA
git reset --hard abc1234
Git’s reflog keeps a history of all HEAD movements, including rebase operations. Use git reflog to see timestamped entries showing where HEAD pointed before the rebase. Look for entries like “rebase (start)” to identify the commit before your rebase began. Once you find the correct entry (usually HEAD@{1} for the most recent operation), use git reset --hard with that reference to completely restore your branch state. This discards all rebase changes and returns you to the exact state before the rebase started.
Best Practice Note:
This is the recovery method we use in CoreUI development when rebases become problematic or produce unexpected results. The reflog is local to your repository and expires after 90 days by default, so this method only works for recent operations and won’t affect commits already pushed to remote repositories.
