Five Git States and Their Sequential Operations

Sequential Operations Between Five States

Four Areas

Five States

Sequential Operations

Step 0: Working area and repository are consistent.

Step 1: Files are added, deleted or modified, entering the Modified state.

Step 2: git add moves files to the Staged state.

Step 3: git commit creates a commit, entering the Committed state.

Step 4: git push uploads the commit, entering the Pushed state.

Reverting Operations Between Five States

Modified but Not Staged

Staged but Not Committed

At this point git add has been executed but git commit has not, and git diff shows no changes.

Because git diff checks the difference between the working area and the staging area.

git reset --hard is equivalent to performing git reset followed by git checkout (a two‑step operation).

Committed but Not Pushed

After a commit, a version hash is generated in the repository; this hash can be used later to revert to that specific commit.

Pushed to Remote

Use with caution : normally the local branch is newer than the remote, so a normal git push suffices, but if you need to overwrite the remote (e.g., after a rollback or a divergent history), add the -f flag to force the push.

Summary

First, run git status to view the current state.

git reset can operate on the local repository to revert or advance to any version, or on the staging area to undo staged changes; it has --hard and --soft options. The soft option (or omitting it) leaves the reverted changes in the working area.

git checkout is used to revert deletions and modifications, while git clean -df reverts added files.

git diff shows changes and differences between the working area, staging area, and repository, with various parameters to control the scope.

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