Staging a Git Revert Pull Request
The Why
When dealing with a risky feature branch change, you may want to have a revert PR already up and ready to merge just in case things get thorny after you deploy. This is useful if you need a lot of folks to sign off on a merge into your repo, or your CI can take some time to run. Having a revert ready to go can give you more confidence to ship.
I searched high and low for a way to do this. A co-worker of mine told me how and I thought I'd share the technique here in case others find it interesting.
For the sake of our example, let's assume we have a repo with a main branch that is production and our feature branch called baseball.
The Workflow
First we need to be on our feature branch, baseball, so let's check it out.
git checkout baseball
Now let's create a new branch off of our feature branch that we'll use for our revert. The name doesn't matter. Call it whatever you want. We'll call ours baseball-revert.
git checkout -B baseball-revert
Then we'll create our patch file. You can also download the patch file from Github if you've created a PR for your feature branch.
git diff origin/main...baseball > baseball.patch
A patch file is a file that stores the diff between files. Here is an example of a patch from this blog post.
/var/folder/staging-a-git-revert-pull-request.md content/posts/staging-a-git-revert-pull-request.md
25 git checkout -B baseball-rever 25 git checkout -B baseball-rever
t t
26 ``` 26 ```
27 27
28 Then we'll create our patch fi 28 Then we'll create our patch fi
le. You can also download the le. You can also download the
patch file from Github if you' patch file from Github if you'
ve created a PR for your featu ve created a PR for your featu
re branch. re branch.
29 29
30 A patch file is a file that st
ores the diff between files.
31
30 ``` 32 ```
31 git diff origin/main...basebal 33 git diff origin/main...basebal
l > baseball.patch l > baseball.patch
32 ``` 34 ```
33 35
34 With our patch file created we 36 With our patch file created we
can apply it using `git apply can apply it using `git apply
`, but we need to apply it in `, but we need to apply it in
reverse. reverse.
With our patch file created we can apply it using git apply, but we need to apply it in reverse.
git apply --reverse baseball.patch
Remove the patch file now that we've applied the changes to our baseball-revert branch.
rm baseball.patch
That's it! Commit your changes and you can push it up and create a pull request. You'll want to base the branch off of your feature branch in Github so folks can review your changes.
git push origin baseball-revert
Happy shipping! 🥳