So you’ve pushed a few (or more) bad commits in a row, and you want to throw away those changes. Sometimes it helps to jump straight back to a previous commit.

Try it out:

# Check that "git status" is clean:
$ git status

# Set the index (staging area) to be as it was at commit db0bc:
$ git read-tree db0bc

# Create a commit based on that index:
$ git commit -m "Going back to the state at commit db0bc"

# Your working tree will still be as it was when you started, so
# you'll want to reset that to the new commit:
$ git reset --hard

Code courtesy of Mark Longair over at Stack Overflow.