In order to rewrite history you need to use git rebase -i <commit_id>.

This is useful for the following scenario

• deleting useless commit log
• putting your commits on top of other branch (e.g. if someone else updated master while you are working on your branch), so that it is more readable
• undoing certain commits (even those in the past)

Note

• This essentially will replay the commits in order, so if you want you can change the order of the commits.
• <commit_id>here means the starting commit for the rebase. You can also do HEAD~n where n is a number
• Please note that you cannot squash,fixup, or drop without previous commit

In case of error (can’t be rebased), you can always do git rebase --abort

This is the best (and up-to-date) guide so far.

If you rebase/rewrite the history you might need to put --force to push to your remote

Lastly, please DO NOT rebase public branch (e.g. master)

On the other hand if you need to pull a rebased upstream repository, this is a good shortcut

$ git fetch upstream master
$ git merge --keep upstream/master

Revert

If you don’t want to lose the history, instead you can do git revert --no-commit <commit_id_1> <commit_id_2>

This is followed by git revert --continue. This will revert certain commit just fine and on top of that it add another commit for the revert itself

Or if you want to abort then git revert --abort