On: How to undo almost anything with Git

[herge]

For what it's worth, you could have looked at the reflog of the git repo on the server and it would still have a reference (the hexadecimal hash) to the develop branch before your git push -f.

[mmanfrin → herge]

We had the hash, but no one had it locally and we could not pull it down since I had overwritten the history.

[simoncion → mmanfrin]

This isn't a criticism. I'm either missing info, and am making a fool of myself, or telling you about something you didn't know was possible:

You either had git configured on the server to git-gc after every push, or were unable to ssh into the server?

If neither one of those is true, then -IIRC- you could have either:

1) Logged in to the server, rewritten the affected repo's branch to point to the pre-disaster commit hash.

2) Pull down the repo's .git directory from the server, rewrite the branch, and force push that.

Would either one of those have been more work than working with your CI system?

[phaemon → simoncion]

He mentions in a different bit that it was actually on github, not their own git server. There is a way to get the reflog and write a new branch to point to the commit using github's API mentioned above.

[simoncion → phaemon]

Ah. Thanks for the info!