Reflog

I wanna explain the reflog command by going into a familar scenario.

What happens when you accidentaly delete a local branch or overwrite a commit. For beginner and intermediate users like me, it can seem like there is a no way to recover.

Git has a less known command called reflog.

git reflog

git reflog is a command that gives you access to a log of previous Git operations. The reflog command is like a time machine view into your Git workflow: it effectively gives you the history of everything that has changed HEAD, a special name that points to the commit that represents the current state of your local repository.

It even tracks changes that may not appear in the typical commit history:

• Creating commits
• Switching branches
• Resetting branches
• Amending commits
• Merges and rebases
• Reverting a commit
• Stashing changes
• Pulls and fetches
• Force pushes

Think of the git reflog command as a Git's version of shell history. Its also similar to the history command in a way that, it shows only the logs that are happened into your own, local session.

Now how is that relates to our disaster despair scenario?

Let's create a branch, create a file and commit that.

$ git checkout -b big-feature
Switched to a new branch 'big-feature'

$ git commit -m 'big-change'
[big-feature a400869] big-change
 1 file changed, 0 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
 create mode 100644 content/en/biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigggggg


$ git checkout main
Switched to branch 'main'

$ git branch -D big-feature
Deleted branch big-feature (was a400869).


$ git branch -v
* main 8c76b1d update post

Oops... You get that? we lost our branch!

Let's see what reflog has for us:

git reflog

8c76b1d (HEAD -> main, origin/main) HEAD@{0}: checkout: moving from big-feature to main
a400869 HEAD@{1}: commit: big-change
8c76b1d (HEAD -> main, origin/main) HEAD@{2}: checkout: moving from main to big-feature
8c76b1d (HEAD -> main, origin/main) HEAD@{3}: commit: update post

We can see that there is a log entry for a commit that moved the commit hash to a400869.

Then, to get our big-change branch back, we simply use the git checkout -b command to create a new big-change branch with the commit hash as its most recent commit:

git checkout -b big-change a400869

Now, our big-feature branch is exactly where it was before. Cool.