How can I restore files before a certain commit in GitHub?

Question

The two very different answers below suggest that you might want to clarify what you want to happen :) — Mark Longair, Mar 08 '11 at 20:13

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:19

If you want to retrieve an individual file from before the commit f4l4fe1, for example, you can do:
```
git checkout f4l4fe1^ -- some/file.txt
```
(When you add a ^ to a ref in git, it means the parent of that commit.) You should find some/file.txt back in your working tree, but note that it will also be staged as a change to commit.
If you want to just see the working tree as it was on the previous commit, you can check out the commit as if it were a branch:
```
git checkout f4l4fe1^
```
That puts you into a state known as "detached HEAD" where you're no longer on a particular branch, so making new commits won't advance any branch. To get back to master, say, you'd just do git checkout master.
As a third option, suppose you want to extract a whole directory from that commit, or a whole subdirectory, you can use git archive and pipe the output to tar, as explained in: What's the best way to extract a tree from a git repository?

1 Answers1