Using git reset --hard can be considered not good practice in many situations, especially in shared or collaborative environments, for several reasons:
- git reset --hard rewrites the commit history by moving the HEAD and potentially discarding commits. This can cause confusion or conflicts if others are working on the same branch, as their copies of the history will no longer match yours.
- In collaborative environments, this can lead to lost work or the need for force pushes, which can be problematic.
- Since git reset --hard removes both staged and unstaged changes, it can lead to permanent loss of work if those changes weren't committed or saved elsewhere.
- Once executed, the discarded changes are typically unrecoverable without additional backups.
- If you've already pushed commits to a shared branch and then perform a hard reset followed by a force push, it can disrupt others’ work, leading to merge conflicts or lost changes for your collaborators.
- After a hard reset, if the branch has been pushed, you’ll often need to use git push --force, which is generally discouraged because it can overwrite remote history and create potential issues for other team members.
- Local Feature Branches: When you’re the only one working on a branch, and you haven’t shared it with others yet.
- Personal Projects: When you are the sole contributor, and no one else is relying on the history of your branch.
- Emergency Fixes: When you need to quickly undo local changes to get back to a known good state.
- git revert: Creates a new commit that undoes the changes of a specific commit without rewriting history, safe for shared branches.
- git restore or git checkout -- <file>: Discards changes in the working directory without affecting the commit history.
