Un-Delete a branch in git

General • Tuesday, Apr 12, 2022

Learn how to recover a mistakenly deleted remote branch in Git. Even if using the -D force delete option, Git has a solution

This tutorial will show you how to un-delete a branch from the remote repository, if you happen to delete it by mistake. This tutorial will work even if you used the -D option while deleting which stands for force delete.

$ git branch -D an_important_branch

With just one tiny statement on the command line, I managed to delete the very stuff I was working on. Apparently, git plans for this kind of mistakes, and it is quite easy to go back in time to a place free of grievous errors. Here is the fix:

$ git checkout -b an_important_branch HEAD@{1}

Some of this will look like very ordinary git stuff. Up until the HEAD@{1}, the above git command is just checking out a new branch. The HEAD@1 specifies that the source for the new branch is ... not the current branch. So what is this HEAD@{1}? It turns out that git keeps track of changes to the head of each branch using a tool NAMED reflog, witch is short for reference log. You can look at what reflog is storing at any time:

$ git reflog
121f1ea HEAD@{0}: commit: refactor EventManager
cdb109f HEAD@{1}: rebase -i (finish): returning to refs/heads/master
cbb109f HEAD@{2}: rebase -i (squash): Bug: EventManager
9b367e8 HEAD@{4}: rebase -i (squash): # This is a combination of 2 commits.
bacc817 HEAD@{5}: rebase -i (squash): updating HEAD
7b90379 HEAD@{6}: rebase -i (squash): # This is a combination of 3 commits.
ba6c417 HEAD@{7}: rebase -i (squash): updating HEAD
fa11efd HEAD@{8}: checkout: moving from master to fa11efd
9a7d180 HEAD@{9}: commit: event managers no longer trigger swipe during drag

Reflog says that I did a normal commit. Before that I squashed some commits using an interactive rebase. Before that I switched branches.

So in the magic undelete code HEAD@{1} refers to reflog for the branch before it was deleted.

Of course, it is always wiser to use the -d option when deleting. That way git provides a nice warning if a branch is being deleted before it has been merged into master.