emergency-rescue

# Emergency Rescue Kit

Step-by-step recovery procedures for the worst moments in a developer's day. Every section follows the same pattern: **diagnose → fix → verify**. Commands are non-destructive by default. Destructive steps are flagged.

When something has gone wrong, find your situation below and follow the steps in order.

## When to Use

- Someone force-pushed to main and overwrote history
- Credentials were committed to a public repository
- A rebase or reset destroyed commits you need
- Disk is full and nothing works
- A process is consuming all memory or won't die
- A database migration failed halfway through
- A deploy needs to be rolled back immediately
- SSH access is locked out
- SSL certificates expired in production
- You don't know what went wrong, but it's broken

---

## Git Disasters

### Force-pushed to main (or any shared branch)

Someone ran `git push --force` and overwrote remote history.

```bash
# DIAGNOSE: Check the reflog on any machine that had the old state
git reflog show origin/main
# Look for the last known-good commit hash

# FIX (if you have the old state locally):
git push origin <good-commit-hash>:main --force-with-lease
# --force-with-lease is safer than --force: it fails if remote changed again

# FIX (if you DON'T have the old state locally):
# GitHub/GitLab retain force-pushed refs temporarily

# GitHub: check the "push" event in the audit log or use the API
gh api repos/{owner}/{repo}/events --jq '.[] | select(.type=="PushEvent") | .payload.before'

# GitLab: check the reflog on the server (admin access needed)
# Or restore from any CI runner or team member's local clone

# VERIFY:
git log --oneline -10 origin/main
# Confirm the history looks correct
```

### Lost commits after rebase or reset --hard

You ran `git rebase` or `git reset --hard` and commits disappeared.

```bash
# DIAGNOSE: Your commits are NOT gone. Git keeps everything for 30+ days.
git reflog
# Find the commit hash from BEFORE the rebase/reset
# Look for e...