Accidentally committed to the wrong branch? Here is how to fix it.

If you have made a commit to the wrong branch, there is nothing to worry about. You can easily move the commit to the correct branch. Let me show you how with an example:

Let’s say I made a commit to the main branch that was meant to be in the feature_1 branch (commit 55f0c29 shown below).

* 55f0c29 (HEAD -> main) Add settings flag for feature_1
* 4015b6f Provide default for product size
* d8dc31c Add db info to settings

We want to undo that last commit and keep the changes. To do that, we use the reset command with the --soft flag.

(main)$ git reset --soft HEAD^ 

HEAD^ means the commit before where HEAD is now. In our case 4015b6f. We use --soft so that Git preserves our changes. If we look at Git status we will see that our change is still there:

(main)$ git status
On branch main
Changes to be committed:
  (use "git restore --staged <file>..." to unstage)
	modified:   file.txt

Now we can check out the destination branch and make our commit there. In my case feature_1 branch didn’t exist, so I am creating it here with the -b flag:

(main)$ git checkout -b feature_1
Switched to a new branch 'feature_1'

(feature_1)$ git status
On branch feature_1
Changes to be committed:
  (use "git restore --staged <file>..." to unstage)
	modified:   file.txt

(feature_1)$ git commit -m "Add settings flag for feature_1"
[feature_1 ef640e4] Add settings flag for feature_1
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+) 

If I look at my Git log I see that HEAD is pointing to the new commit in the new branch:

* ef640e4 (HEAD -> feature_1) Add settings flag for feature_1
* 4015b6f (main) Provide default for product size.
* d8dc31c Add db info to settings.