You were working in a git repo and you committed your change to master. Happens all the time. Panic not.

Here are the steps to recover

Create a new branch from your current master branch. This will include your new commit.  (to be clear, you should replace ‘description-of-work’  with a short name for your new branch)

git branch description-of-work

now reset your current master branch to upstream

git reset --hard origin/master

All fixed.

Why did this work?

A branch in git points to a specific commit.  All commits are named by hashes.  For example, right now, I have a keystone repo with my master branch pointing to

$ git show master
commit bbfd58a6c190607f7063d15a3e2836e40806ef57
Merge: e523119 f18911e
Author: Jenkins <jenkins@review.openstack.org>
Date: Fri Jul 11 23:36:17 2014 +0000

Merge "Do not use keystone's config for nova's port"

This is defined by a file in .git/refs:

$ cat .git/refs/heads/master 
bbfd58a6c190607f7063d15a3e2836e40806ef57

I could edit this file by hand and have the same effect as a git checkout. Lets do exactly that.

$ cp .git/refs/heads/master .git/refs/heads/edit-by-hand
$ git branch 
  edit-by-hand
* master
$ git show edit-by-hand 
commit bbfd58a6c190607f7063d15a3e2836e40806ef57
Merge: e523119 f18911e
Author: Jenkins 
Date:   Fri Jul 11 23:36:17 2014 +0000

    Merge "Do not use keystone's config for nova's port"

OK, lets modify this the right way:

$ git checkout edit-by-hand 
Switched to branch 'edit-by-hand'
$ git reset --hard HEAD~1
HEAD is now at e523119 Merge "Adds hacking check for debug logging translations"
$ git show edit-by-hand 
commit e52311945a4ab3b47a39084b51a2cc596a2a1161
Merge: b0d690a 76baf5b
Author: Jenkins 
Date:   Fri Jul 11 22:19:03 2014 +0000

    Merge "Adds hacking check for debug logging translations"
...

that made it in to:

$ cat .git/refs/heads/edit-by-hand 
e52311945a4ab3b47a39084b51a2cc596a2a1161

Here is the history for the edit-by-hand branch

$ git log edit-by-hand  --oneline

Returns

e523119 Merge "Adds hacking check for debug logging translations"
b0d690a Merge "multi-backend support for identity"
6aa0ad5 Merge "Imported Translations from Transifex"
...

I want the full hash for 6aa0ad5 so:

git show --stat 6aa0ad5
commit 6aa0ad5beb39107ffece6e5d4a068d77f7d51059

Lets set the branch to point to this:

$ echo 6aa0ad5beb39107ffece6e5d4a068d77f7d51059 > .git/refs/heads/edit-by-hand 
$ git show
commit 6aa0ad5beb39107ffece6e5d4a068d77f7d51059
Merge: 2bca93f bf8a2e2
Author: Jenkins 
Date:   Fri Jul 11 21:48:09 2014 +0000

    Merge "Imported Translations from Transifex"

What would you expect now? I haven’t looked yet, but I would expect git to tell me that I have a bunch of unstaged changes; basically, everything that was in the commits on master that I chopped off of edit-by-hand. Lets look:

$ git status
On branch edit-by-hand
Changes to be committed:
  (use "git reset HEAD ..." to unstage)

	modified:   doc/source/configuration.rst
	modified:   doc/source/developing.rst
	modified:   etc/keystone.conf.sample
...
Untracked files:
  (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)

It was pretty long, so I cut out some files.

I can undo all those “changes” by setting the hash back to the original value:

$ echo e52311945a4ab3b47a39084b51a2cc596a2a1161   > .git/refs/heads/edit-by-hand 
$ git status
On branch edit-by-hand
Untracked files:
  (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)

Why did that work? Without the explicit “checkout” command, the current workspace was left unchanged.