Is there any way to delete local commits in Mercurial? - mercurial

So I keep making a silly mistake in Mercurial. Often times, I'll start work without doing an "hg pull" and an "hg update." When I try to push my changes, I get an error.
Is there any way to delete my local commits so I can avoid creating multiple heads, branches, etc? I just want to delete my local commits, merge my changes with the tip, and then re-commit. Sounds simple, right? I can't seem to find any way to easily delete local commits so I can cleanly merge with the tip.
Again, I'm only trying to delete local commits made with "hg ci". I don't want to modify files, revert, etc.

Enable the "strip" extension and type the following:
hg strip #changeset# --keep
Where #changeset# is the hash for the changeset you want to remove. This will remove the said changeset including changesets that descend from it and will leave your working directory untouched. If you wish to also revert your committed code changes remove the --keep option.
For more information, check the Strip Extension.
If you get "unkown command 'strip'" you may need to enable it. To do so find the .hgrc or Mercurial.ini file and add the following to it:
[extensions]
strip =
Note that (as Juozas mentioned in his comment) having multiple heads is normal workflow in Mercurial. You should not use the strip command to battle that. Instead, you should merge your head with the incoming head, resolve any conflicts, test, and then push.
The strip command is useful when you really want to get rid of changesets that pollute the branch. In fact, if you're in this question's situation and you want to completely remove all "draft" change sets permanently, check out the top answer, which basically suggests doing:
hg strip 'roots(outgoing())'

If you are using Hg Tortoise just activate the extension "strip" in:
File/Settings/Extensions/
Select strip
Then select the bottom revision from where you want to start striping, by doing right click on it, and selecting:
Modify history
Strip
Just like this:
In this example it will erase from the 19th revision to the last one commited(22).

Modern answer (only relevant after Mercurial 2.1):
Use Phases and mark the revision(s) that you don't want to share as secret (private). That way when you push they won't get sent.
In TortoiseHG you can right click on a commit to change its phase.
Also: You can also use the extension "rebase" to move your local commits to the head of the shared repository after you pull.

As everyone else is pointing out you should probably just pull and then merge the heads, but if you really want to get rid of your commits without any of the EditingHistory tools then you can just hg clone -r your repo to get all but those changes.
This doesn't delete them from the original repository, but it creates a new clone that doesn't have them. Then you can delete the repo you modified (if you'd like).

I came across this problem too. I made 2 commit and wanted to rollback and delete both commits.
$ hg rollback
But hg rollback just rolls back to the last commit, not the 2 commits. At that time I did not realize this and I changed the code.
When I found hg rollback had just rolled back one commit, I found I could use hg strip #changeset#. So, I used hg log -l 10 to find the latest 10 commits and get the right changeset I wanted to strip.
$ hg log -l 10
changeset: 2499:81a7a8f7a5cd
branch: component_engine
tag: tip
user: myname<myname#email.com>
date: Fri Aug 14 12:22:02 2015 +0800
summary: get runs from sandbox
changeset: 2498:9e3e1de76127
branch: component_engine
user: other_user_name<name#email.com>
date: Mon Aug 03 09:50:18 2015 +0800
summary: Set current destination to a copy incoming exchange
......
$ hg strip 2499
abort: local changes found
What does abort: local changes found mean? It means that hg found changes to the code that haven't been committed yet. So, to solve this, you should hg diff to save the code you have changed and hg revert and hg strip #changeset#. Just like this:
$ hg diff > /PATH/TO/SAVE/YOUR/DIFF/FILE/my.diff
$ hg revert file_you_have_changed
$ hg strip #changeset#
After you have done the above, you can patch the diff file and your code can be added back to your project.
$ patch -p1 < /PATH/TO/SAVE/YOUR/DIFF/FILE/my.diff

You can get around this even more easily with the Rebase extension, just use hg pull --rebase and your commits are automatically re-comitted to the pulled revision, avoiding the branching issue.

hg strip is what you are looking for. It's analogous of git reset if you familiar with git.
Use console:
You need to know the revision number. hg log -l 10. This command shows the last 10 commits. Find commit you are looking for. You need 4 digit number from changeset line changeset: 5888:ba6205914681
Then hg strip -r 5888 --keep. This removes the record of the commit but keeps all files modified and then you could recommit them.
(if you want to delete files to just remove --keep hg strip -r 5888

If you are familiar with git you'll be happy to use histedit that works like git rebase -i.

[Hg Tortoise 4.6.1]
If it's recent action, you can use "Rollback/Undo" action (Ctrl+U).

In addition to Samaursa's excelent answer, you can use the evolve extension's prune as a safe and recoverable version of strip that will allow you to go back in case you do anything wrong.
I have these alias on my .hgrc:
# Prunes all draft changesets on the current repository
reset-tree = prune -r "outgoing() and not obsolete()"
# *STRIPS* all draft changesets on current repository. This deletes history.
force-reset-tree = strip 'roots(outgoing())'
Note that prune also has --keep, just like strip, to keep the working directory intact allowing you to recommit the files.

Related

Mercurial merge branches? (abort: push creates new remote branches)

I'm new to Mercurial, and I made the mistake of making different changes on different systems before the main repository was up to date. (I understand this is what Mercurial is built for, but my thick brain is struggling to resolve the issue.)
Now on my primary development server, everything is up to date and committed. However...
$ hg push
abort: push creates new remote branches: 4f2672f039d7!
(use 'hg push --new-branch' to create new remote branches)
I don't really want a new branch. I just want all the changes to be merged.
$ hg heads
changeset: 459:ff5f94e44aba
branch: 4f2672f039d7
tag: tip
parent: 458:e63d02baf4cf
parent: 455:267abda62069
user: mike#...
date: Tue Sep 13 14:25:16 2011 -0400
summary: Images from prof
changeset: 455:267abda62069
parent: 453:a74757e26357
user: mike#localhost.localdomain
date: Tue Sep 13 09:08:12 2011 -0400
summary: images for FLC
Point me in the right direction?
EDIT: (adding detail)
When I try to merge, I get the following result:
$ hg merge
abort: branch '4f2672f039d7' has one head - please merge with an explicit rev
(run 'hg heads' to see all heads)
I have tried hg merge ff5f94e44aba, and all of the revs listed above, and each one returns the same result:
$ hg merge 267abda62069
abort: merging with a working directory ancestor has no effect
It looks like you've accidentally created a branch with a silly name. What you most likely want to do is reapply your changes with a branch name that makes better sense. There's no totally automatic way of doing this, but you can extract each changeset as a patch, revert to the point where you messed up and reapply those changes on the proper branch.
Basically what you need to do is look at the changelog; probably by running hg out to see what's missing from the central repository. Make a note of each of the revs that you want to keep.
Next update to the last good revision. Make sure that you are on the branch you wanted your commits to be on.
Now you will apply each of the changes you made and commit each one. You can automate this process something like this:
BADREVS="123 124 125 126"
recommit() { hg di -c $1 | patch -p1; hg ci -m "$(hg log -r $1 --template '{desc}')";}
for rev in $BADREVS; do
recommit $rev
done
Now you've got your changes in your local repository twice; once as the commits on the weird branch and again on the right branch. You can push those changes to the central repo using hg push -b GOODBRANCH so that only the changes to the right branch go up; Alternatively, you can install the strip extension to remove the changes you didn't want from the local repo and then you can push as normal.
By the sound of it; you will still have to deal with the changes made to the central repository before you can push, since you pushed changes from another repo. You probably want to do this merging after you clean up the change history in the local repo.
Pull from remote and then update / merge / commit first. Then you won't make new branches.
I've had this happen when I missed a merge. I like the TortoiseHg workbench for this because it can be a little easier to find what you missed through visualization.
A good way to avoid this in the future, how I stopped getting this error, is the fetch extension. Set your post pull to fetch and it will automatically merge for you, which is very nice. If there's a conflict it brings up whatever conflict resolver you use.

How do you delete a commit in Mercurial?

I want to completely delete a Mercurial commit as if it was never entered in the repository and move back to my prior commit.
Is this possible?
If it was your last commit and you haven't pushed it anywhere, you can do that with rollback. Otherwise, no. Not really. Time to change your passwords.
Edit: It has been pointed out that you can clone from an older revision and merge in the changes you want to keep. That's also true, unless you have pushed it to a repo you don't control. Once you push, your data is very likely to be very hard to get back.
You can try to remove mq info about your commit.
For this you need to go File->Settings->Extensions.
There check mq and restart gui.
After that just right click on unneeded commit and
ModifyHistory->Strip
To edit the history I would use the Histedit Extension extension.
hg histedit 45:c3a3a271d11c
However keep in mind this only makes sense in a situation where you have not yet pushed the commits to the public repository, you own the public repository and/or you can account for all the clones out there. If you receive the following error:
abort: can't rebase immutable changeset 43ab8134e7af
It means that Mecurial thinks this is a public changeset (see phases) that has already been pushed - you can force it to be a draft again doing:
hg phase -f -d 45:c3a3a271d11c
I encounter this fairly often. I make a commit and then pull to push. But then there is something incoming that makes my newly made commit unnecessary. A plain hg rollback isn't enough because it only undoes the pull...
This is the thing to do:
hg strip <rev>
Things are painless when you don't push your changesets anywhere.
If it's more than one commit and/or you already pushed it somewhere else, you can clone your repository and specify the last changeset that should be cloned.
See my answer here how to do this:
Mercurial: Fix a borked history
If you only committed locally and didn't push, you can just create a clone locally (as described in my link) and you're done.
If you already pushed to some remote repository, you would have to replace that with your clone.
Of course it depends if you are able (or allowed) to do this.
You can use "hg backout" to do a reverse merge basically. All options are discussed in the freely available book "Mercurial: The Definitive Guide":
http://hgbook.red-bean.com/read/finding-and-fixing-mistakes.html
If using tortoise you can use modify history > strip...
Yes. Unless I am mistaken, as of v2.3 (rel. 2012/08/01) you can use the HisteditExtension with a drop command to drop a commit, along with strip or backout to remove changes.
A simple Google search on the feature: https://www.google.com/webhp#q=histedit+drop
In 2022 I do use evolve extension. It is one of the best extensions for this purpose.
To prune unwanted changeset, if you for example did a quick hack to get the code working:
$ echo 'debug hack' >> file1.c
$ hg commit -m 'debug hack'
Now you have a proper patch you can do hg prune .:
$ hg prune .
1 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved
working directory is now at 2a39221aaebb
1 changesets pruned
If you push the change to the remote repository you will find only obsolescence markers:
$ hg push
searching for changes
no changes found
remote: 1 new obsolescence markers
To check the changes to your local repo you can pull from the remote one:
$ hg pull
pulling from ssh://userid#server/repo
searching for changes
no changes found

How to revert a Mercurial hg pull?

If you do an hg pull and then an hg update (or an hg merge), is there a way to back this out? Ie: revert your repository to the state prior to doing the hg pull?
I believe you can do hg update -r n where you would specify the changeset prior to the pull as n. Though I'm guessing this will still leave the changesets in your repository but this isn't really what we want. ??
hg strip will remove revisions from a repository. Like all powerful commands, its dangerous, so be careful.
https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/StripExtension
Also see:
https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/EditingHistory
If you catch your mistake immediately (or reasonably soon), you can just use hg strip REV to roll back the latest (one or more) changes. ...
Ok, you can't rollback because you've done a commit. What you can do is use 'hg strip' which is part of mq (after 2.8 strip is in it's own extension), or use mq to remove the changes. Either way I suggest you do everything on another clone, just in case.
To do strip, update to a revision that you want to keep, and then
hg strip <REV>
where <REV> is the first revision you want to remove. It will remove that one and all decendents (including your merge commit).
Alternatively you can
hg qnew (if you don't already have a patch queue)
hg qimport <REV>
which will import a single revision into the patch queue. You can then add more, and then use the mq commands to edit, rearrange, delete, or whatever you want to do with those revisions. qdel deletes the current patch.
Edit: Obviously, you'll need to enable the MQ extension for both of these, unless you're using 2.8 or later. In that case strip is in the strip extension, and mq in the mq extension. Both are shipped with the standard installation.
hg --rollback can be used to undo the last transaction so as long as your hg pull is still the most recent transaction then you can use that. This command should be used with care though. See here for some more details.
you can:
hg update -C <version>
see the mercurial FAQ.
If you want to remove all traces of the pull form your history then you need to use an extension as Bert F suggests (the philosophy in mercurial is to never change history)
if you dont mind history containing your mistake you have two slightly different options hg update -C -r which will create a new branch at the version you specify or hg revert -r which will stay on the same branch but create a new uncommited change undoing everything.

No changes are pushed when using hg-git

I'm trying to get the hg-git extension working under Windows and after hours of fiddling, I finally seem to have it working. However, nothing shows up in my git repository even though the output of hg push reads:
importing Hg objects into Git
creating and sending data
github::refs/heads/master => GIT:8d946209
[command completed successfully Wed Oct 20 15:26:47 2010]
Try issuing the command hg bookmark -f master
(use -f to force an existing bookmark to move)
Then try pushing again.
This works because Hg-Git pushes your bookmarks up to the Git server as branches and will pull Git branches down and set them up as bookmarks. (from the official README.md)
And it seems that just after I asked this, I made a trivial change. This was picked up and pushed. So it seems that you have to wait until you've made a new commit in order for hg-git to pick it up.
I had chosen to 'Initialize this repository with a README'. This meant I ended up with two heads, which I couldn't hg merge because one had a bookmark.
To get pushing working, I had to:
configure hg-git and github remote as per https://blog.glyphobet.net/essay/2029
pull from github and update
force the merge (checking which id to use with hg heads),
commit the merge
add a trivial change to a file (add a space char to the end),
commit, then
move the bookmark to the tip
push to my configured github remote
This ended up with commands as follows (substituting in <x> sections)
hg pull github
hg update
hg merge <revision-id-of-incoming-git-version>
hg addremove
hg commit -m 'merged with github'
# make some trivial change to a file - eg add a space where it doesn't cause harm
hg add <changed-file>
hg commit -m 'trivial change'
hg bookmark -f master
hg push github
make sure you pick the remote revision for the merge above - if you don't it doesn't work!

Abandoning changes without deleting from history

There is a commit that just didn't work, so I want to abandon it without deleting it from history.
I have updated from an earlier revision and committed, thus creating a new head.
I don't have branches, I don't want branches, I just want to simply go on with the new head exactly as it is, nothing fancy, no merge, no worries, just go on forgetting the previous one.
I can't seem to find how to do that, and I'm starting to believe it can't be done. All I find is stuff about branches, or stuff about merging.
Update your repository to the head with the revision that you want to forget about, then use hg commit --close-branch to mark that (anonymous) branch as closed. Then update to the head of the branch that you do want, and continue working.
You can still see the closed branch if you use the -c option to hg heads, but it won't show up by default and hg merge will know not try to merge with the closed head.
You will need to use hg push --force the first time you push this closed head to another repository since you are actually create additional heads in the remote repository when you push. So tell Mercurial that this is okay with --force. People who pull the closed head wont be bothered by any warnings.
I know you don't want to work with branches at this stage, but that's exactly what you've done. When you went back to an earlier version and committed something that worked you created a branch - an unnamed branch, but a branch all the same.
There's no problem with just carrying on just as you are and not worrying about having multiple heads, but if you want to tidy things up so you don't accidentally pick the wrong head one time then you can kill off the old branch.
There's a good section in the Mercurial documentation that takes you through a number of options around Pruning Dead Branches.
I think the best option for you is to mark the old branch as "closed". If your old head is revision "123" then:
hg update -r 123
hg commit --close-branch -m 'Closing old branch'
hg update -C default
First of all, type:
hg heads
Imagine, you have three heads listed:
changeset: 223:d1c3deae6297
user: Your name <your#email.com>
date: Mon Jun 09 02:24:23 2014 +0200
summary: commit description #3
changeset: 123:91c5402959z3
user: Your name <your#email.com>
date: Sat Dec 23 16:05:38 2013 +0200
summary: commit description #2
changeset: 59:81b9804156a8
user: Your name <your#email.com>
date: Sat Sep 14 13:14:40 2013 +0200
summary: commit description #1
Let's say, you want to keep the last head active (223) and close the rest.
You would then do as follows:
Close head #59
hg up -r 59
hg ci --close-branch -m "clean up heads; approach abandoned"
Close head #123
hg up -r 123
hg ci --close-branch -m "clean up heads; approach abandoned"
Commit the changes
hg push
Don't forget to switch to the right head at the end
hg up -r 223
And you're done.
You want to use hg backout. This removes the changes made by the changeset from any child changeset.
Check this out for a good explanation.
Mercurial Backout
An alternative to closing or stripping the unwanted branch would be to merge it in a way that totally discards its effects, but leaves it in history. This approach will allow those unwanted changes to propagate in a push - so only use this if that is the intended effect.
Let's say the changeset history looks like this:
1-2-3-4-5-6
\
7-8-*
and it is 5 and 6 which are no longer wanted.
You can do this:
hg up 8
hg merge -r 6 -t :local
hg commit ...
which will create this:
1-2-3-4-5-6
\ \
7-8-9-*
The update to 8 ensures you are working at the desired head in history, which you want to keep.
The -t :local instructs hg to use the merge "tool" called local which tells it to ignore changes from the other branch, i.e., the one NOT represented by the current working folder state. More info.
Thus the unwanted changes in 5 and 6 are preserved in history but do not affect anything more recent.
Both Niall's and Nick's answers are straight on. Because I find myself creating lots of dangling heads, I ended up writing an alias to close heads more easily. By adding this to your .hgrc:
[alias]
behead = !REV=$($HG id -i); $HG update $# -q && $HG ci --close-branch -m "Closing dead head" && $HG update $REV -q
(if you already have an [alias] section, you can append to it instead)
You can now close a head in one single-command (and without having to update to a different changeset manually) like this:
$ hg behead 123
Note: the alias takes advantage of the fact that Mercurial aliases can be shell commands. This means that this will probably only work on UNIX, not on Windows.
This is a use case for the Evolve extension. It's currently not bundled with Mercurial, so it is technically a third party extension. But it's being used quite heavily by a bunch of people, including Mercurial developers, is being very actively developed, and isn't going anywhere.
With the Evolve extension, you simply do
hg prune -r revname
and get on with your life. The cset will still be there, but obsoleted. It won't be visible unless you pass the --hidden option to Mercurial commands, and by default won't be pushed to remote repositories. Though I think you can force it if you really want to.
If the cset you are pruning has ancestors you want to keep, then you'll have to run hg evolve to rebase those changesets. hg evolve will do so automatically. Otherwise, you don't have to do anything.
You may clone your corrupted repo to a new one without cloning that unwanted head. Then remove old repository, move newly created clone to the original place and continue working with it. This will take some time, but you'll get a perfectly clean repository without a sign of that unwanted revision.
hg clone --rev myGoodResition myDirtyRepo myCleanRepo
I have run into this issue many times when I want to behead a head that was created in error. I always want to see it disappear off the face of the Earth.
On your local copy, get the latest and then:
Find the beginning of a head you want to strip (where a new neck starts to branch off), get the revision number
Strip it.
Source: TipsAndTricks.
Source: PruningDeadBranches#Using_strip.
hg --config extensions.hgext.mq= strip -n <rev>
Make a trivial file update (add a whitespace to a file), commit and push.
Your repo should now have the head stripped. The last step is important as stripping doesn't create any changes you can push to your central repository. Without the last step you only have stripped the head locally.