CODEWITHSUNDEEP
git
mostwanted
mostwanted

Reputation: 1649

How to restore a whole directory from history of git repository?

I would like to restore a whole directory (recursively) from the history of my git repository.

There is only 1 branch (master).

I know the commit where errors were included.

Can I use the sha1 hash of the parent commit to restore the state of the directory as it was before the errors were included?

I thought about something like this:

git checkout 348ce0aa02d3738e55ac9085080028b548e3d8d3 path/to/the/folder/

but it did not work.

Upvotes: 130

Views: 102467

Answers (6)

Rafay
Rafay

Reputation: 6188

You can do git checkout master -- path/to/the/folder-you-want-to-restore/ to restore a directory or file on your local branch from the master branch.

Upvotes: 3

uptoyou
uptoyou

Reputation: 1797

For modern git (-s or --source):

git restore -s commit-sha-that-contains-dir relative/path/to/folder

man reference:

-s <tree>, --source=<tree>
   Restore the working tree files with the content from the given tree. It is common to specify
   the source tree by naming a commit, branch or tag associated with it.

   If not specified, the contents are restored from HEAD if --staged is given, otherwise from the index.

   As a special case, you may use "A...B" as a shortcut for the merge base of A and B if there
   is exactly one merge base. You can leave out at most one of A and B, in which case it
   defaults to HEAD.

Upvotes: 13

amalik2205
amalik2205

Reputation: 4162

git checkout -- path/to/folder/

Upvotes: 3

Carlos Campderr&#243;s
Carlos Campderr&#243;s

Reputation: 22972

try adding '--' between revisions and paths:

git checkout 348ce0aa02d3738e55ac9085080028b548e3d8d3 -- path/to/the/folder/

And if you want to recover a directory from the previous commit, you can replace the commit hash by HEAD~1, for example:

git checkout HEAD~1 -- path/to/the/folder/

Upvotes: 219

Mark Fisher
Mark Fisher

Reputation: 9886

If you simply do git checkout <SHA-ID> then it will temporarily move you to that sha-commit.

Each commit object holds the entire structure of the disk at that time, so if you have files there and need to copy them out, you can do so. Warning though, you will not be in any branch, so you'll have to move back to master before copying the file into your working tree and commit it.

Upvotes: 1

Daniel Pittman
Daniel Pittman

Reputation: 17182

There are two easy ways to do this:

If the commit that included the errors only included the errors, use git revert to invert the effects of it.

If not, the easy path is this:

  1. git checkout 348…
  2. cp -a path/to/the/folder ../tmp-restore-folder
  3. git checkout HEAD # or whatever
  4. rm -rf path/to/the/folder
  5. mv ../tmp-restore-folder path/to/the/folder
  6. git add path/to/the/folder
  7. git commit -m "revert …"

Upvotes: 5

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