How to Discard Changes in Git (with git restore)

No matter how experienced you are as a programmer, not all of your code will always work at the first try. Luckily, Git allows you to discard and undo any of your changes, providing a safety net for your work.

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Discarding Local Changes in a File

Changes that haven't been committed are called "local" changes — they exist in your working copy but haven't been wrapped in a commit yet.

To discard all uncommitted local changes in a specific file:

$ git restore index.html

Be careful: you cannot get these changes back once you've discarded them.

To discard all local changes across the entire project at once:

$ git restore .

If you also have untracked (new) files you want to remove:

$ git clean -fd

Unstaging Changes

If you've run git add but haven't committed yet and want to remove files from the staging area (without touching the actual file contents), use the --staged flag:

$ git restore --staged index.html

To unstage everything at once:

$ git restore --staged .

For fine-grained control, the --patch flag lets you step through each changed chunk interactively and choose whether to unstage or discard it:

$ git restore --patch index.html

Restoring a Specific Revision of a File

You can restore a file to how it looked at any point in history using the --source flag:

$ git restore --source 7173808e index.html
$ git restore --source master~2 index.html

The first example restores the file as it was in commit 7173808e. The second restores it as it was two commits before the current tip of master.

Saving Changes to the Stash

If you're not sure whether you'll need your changes later, save them temporarily on the stash instead of discarding them:

$ git stash --include-untracked

This leaves you with a clean working copy while preserving the changes. To restore them later:

$ git stash pop