CODEWITHSUNDEEP
gitbranchcommitrecovery
mickael9
mickael9

Reputation: 488

Recover unreferenced commits from remote git repository

Here's the situation : some commits have been done in a remote repository.

Unfortunately, someone did push -f such that no remote branch references these commits anymore.

To make matters worse, I don't have those commits in my local clone.

My goal is basically to recover those commits. These are some of the things I tried :

The repository is on bitbucket, and the commit is accessible from the web interface, so it hasn't been garbage-collected.

Upvotes: 9

Views: 1737

Answers (4)

aiodintsov
aiodintsov

Reputation: 2605

Just had to do this after deleting a branch too early on github and having no commit locally.

I was able to find the commit of interest in the CI/CD tool and having SHA256 was able to use github API with curl:

curl -L \
  -X POST \
  -H "Accept: application/vnd.github+json" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer <YOUR-TOKEN>" \
  -H "X-GitHub-Api-Version: 2022-11-28" \
  https://api.github.com/repos/OWNER/REPO/git/refs \
  -d '{"ref":"refs/heads/featureA","sha":"aa218f56b14c9653891f9e74264a383fa43fefbd"}'

worked right away, featureA was created.

for other API options you can check this page: https://docs.github.com/en/rest/git/refs?apiVersion=2022-11-28#create-a-reference

Upvotes: 0

Mikhail Maximov
Mikhail Maximov

Reputation: 21

There is little trick - you said you have open the commit in web-interface. My version of the Stash has ability to create a tag on this commit. Look for "No tags [+]"

Upvotes: 2

Wim Coenen
Wim Coenen

Reputation: 66753

If you have the hash of the commit, then you can download the source tree from bitbucket with a link like this:

https://bitbucket.org/ownerName/repositoryName/get/A0B1C2D.zip

Both .zip and .tar.gz work.

This doesn't recover the commit(s) exactly, but at least you won't lose the source code changes. I used this to simply create another commit with the same changes.

Upvotes: 3

janos
janos

Reputation: 124714

The problem is that your local repository doesn't have that commit id.

git checkout -b recovery <commit_id>
git push origin <commit_id>:recovery

Both of these commands fail for that reason, I get the exact same messages with a GitHub repo if I use a commit id that doesn't exist locally.

I thought the answer will be simply fetching the lost commits locally, in one of these ways:

git fetch origin         #1
git fetch origin SHA1    #2
git fetch origin SHA1:refs/remotes/origin/recovery  #3

Unfortunately none of these work. It seems #2 used to work as of Git v1.4 according to this answer. As of now, it doesn't work anymore.

There is a help page for this on GitHub, but with no answer that you can use: it basically says that if you have the commit locally you can create a branch from it and push it. Yeah, but if you don't have the commit locally then what? It doesn't answer that.

I can think of two options:

  1. Find a teammate who has this commit. It's easy to check with git log SHA1. If anybody has it, they can create a branch from it with git branch recovery SHA1 and then push it.
  2. Contact bitbucket support. Since they have the commit, somewhere, they should be able to create a recovery branch for you.

Upvotes: 6

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