🐞 Git Incident Report: Local `main` Branch Got 19 Unexpected Commits

📅 What Happened

One morning, I had already finished developing a feature on a separate branch. Before creating a Pull Request (PR), I merged main into my feature branch to make sure everything was up to date.

After that, I switched to the main branch and ran:

git pull

To my surprise, the local main branch suddenly had 19 commits ahead of origin/main, ready to push. Since the main branch is protected, I couldn’t push directly.

I panicked and tried:

git reset

...but that didn't solve anything. So I decided to analyze the situation step-by-step.

🔍 Investigation

1. Check commit movements with reflog

git reflog

From there, I saw that commits from the feature branch I had worked on were somehow merged into main during a brief moment.

2. Inspect latest commit of `origin/main`

git log origin/main -1 --oneline

Result:

15fa42562 (origin/main, origin/HEAD) Merged PR 28340: K01335

3. Compare with local `main`

git log main -1 --oneline

Result:

3f783009f (HEAD -> main, origin/dev/_falsely_commit, dev/_falsely_commit) Merge branch 'main' of https://visualstudio.com/_git/HRMS2.Mobile

This confirmed: local main was pointing to a completely different commit than origin/main.

🔄 Compare Commits

Is my local branch behind?

git log main..origin/main --oneline

Output: (empty)
✅ This means: Local main is not behind origin/main.

Is my local branch ahead?

git log origin/main..main --oneline

Output:

3f783009f Merge branch 'main'...
494a85db7 K1432 - minor style
396dd53cd Merge branch 'main' into dev/SAW/K1432
...

➡️ These were exactly the same commits as those in my feature branch dev/SAW/K1432.

This confirmed that the commits on local main were just accidental merges from the feature branch, and didn't belong there.

✅ The Fix

Since I was confident that those commits already existed in the proper feature branches, I safely reset my local main branch to match the remote:

git reset --hard origin/main

All done — the local main was clean again with zero loss, and the remote commit history remained untouched.

📝 Notes

If you want to remove commits permanently, you can refer to:
👉 https://gist.github.com/4sskick/7de05ee677a4c5853c744fda476225ef
Always consider making a backup branch before doing a hard reset:
```
git branch backup-main-before-reset
```

4sskick/Revert a.k.a Rollback on protected branch.md

🐞 Git Incident Report: Local main Branch Got 19 Unexpected Commits