Git – How to Undo a Git Push on GitHub

You need to make sure that no other users of this repository are fetching the incorrect changes or trying to build on top of the commits that you want removed because you are about to rewind history.

Then you need to 'force' push the old reference.

git push -f origin last_known_good_commit:branch_name

or in your case

git push -f origin cc4b63bebb6:alpha-0.3.0

You may have receive.denyNonFastForwards set on the remote repository. If this is the case, then you will get an error which includes the phrase [remote rejected].

In this scenario, you will have to delete and recreate the branch.

git push origin :alpha-0.3.0
git push origin cc4b63bebb6:refs/heads/alpha-0.3.0

If this doesn't work - perhaps because you have receive.denyDeletes set, then you have to have direct access to the repository. In the remote repository, you then have to do something like the following plumbing command.

git update-ref refs/heads/alpha-0.3.0 cc4b63bebb6 83c9191dea8

When working with github, refer to GHugo's answer which gives a foolproof procedure with github. If you're on an in-house (or other non-github) installation, read on.

You can always restore the previously observed state of master, by resetting to the old commit and issuing another push -f. The steps involved typically look like this:

# work on local master
git checkout master

# reset to the previous state of origin/master, as recorded by reflog
git reset --hard origin/master@{1}

# at this point verify that this is indeed the desired commit.
# (if necessary, use git reflog to find the right one, and
# git reset --hard to that one)

# finally, push the master branch (and only the master branch) to the server
git push -f origin master

Note, however, that this restores remote master to the state most recently retrieved by git fetch or equivalent. Any commits pushed by others after the last time you fetched will be lost. However, those commits will still be available in their reflogs, so they can restore them using steps like the above.