picostitch
crafting (and) JavaScript
#tools

Restore deleted git branch

I had deleted a git branch locally, which I wanted to restore. It's totally easy. A tiny bit of knowledge upfront. There is something called the reflog, it's kinda like the hidden git history, that knows every change you did on the repo, every change, and it does NOT throw away anything.

Step 1 - Find the last commit on the deleted branch

The command is git reflog is to "manage reflog information" in git speak, per the official docs. That meant nothing to me. I translated it for me to be the action log, super history or the git spy who sees everything I do :).

Run git reflog show to see all the commits of any branch you have, including the deleted ones. Find the commit that was the top of the branch you want to restore. By top of I mean the last commit, basically the end by which you want to grab this branch out of the reflog and restore it.

Step 2 - Restore it

Restore it by running git branch <branch-name> <commit-hash>. I assume you can give it any name for <branch-name>, but I didn't try. Just make sure you get the right <commit-hash>, which is this strange looking unreadable string of characters and numbers.

I hope this helps (me) when reading it (again).