Back Story

(tl;dr here)

While working on improved ESC8 detections for Locksmith, I built a thing that temporarily disabled certificate validity checks for the current PowerShell session. This was intended to be part of Locksmith 2024.9, but the .NET interface I used was only supported in WIndows PowerShell aka Desktop Edition aka PS5.1. PS7/.NET Core would complain about the interface no longer existing.

The Locksmith team decided to skip the 2024.9 release because we hate releasing clearly buggy code. (Subtly buggy code is fine.)

But I couldn’t leave PS5.1 and PS7 with different levels of support. I spent some time in September building conditional checks that would use different .NETty stuff (that I honestly don’t understand) if Locksmith was used in PS7. It worked great, so we included the feature in 2024.10.

Shortly after releasing Locksmith 2024.10, I was cleaning up branches (a clean repo is a happy repo), and saw the add-ps7-support-to-esc8-detections branch showing as active. I thought to myself “huh… musta forgot to delete after merging.” I deleted the branch and moved on with my night.

But I’d effed up. I never actually merged the changes into the testing branch which means they didn’t make it into the main branch which means they didn’t make it into the release packages. I realized my mistake earlier this week and began searching frantically for any machine that contained the branch so I could recreate it and get it into the 2024.11 release.

I couldn’t find the branch anywhere.

So this morning, I did what I should’ve done a while ago and used the Googles. After a little digging, I found a GitHub community thread which gave me just enough information to figure this out.

I restored the branch, then YOLO merged it into testing without review because it had already been reviewed. Look for it in 2024.11!

tl;dr

  1. Visit the GitHub repo in question and click the “Activity” icon:Screenshot 2024-10-26 at 8.41.54 AM.png
  2. Find an entry in the activity log title “Deleted branch” that mentions the branch you deleted by mistake. Click the three dot menu ... at the right end of the “Deleted branch” activity and choose “Restore Branch”:Screenshot 2024-10-26 at 8.50.18 AM.png
  3. Wait a few minutes.
  4. Breathe a sigh of relief!

If this guide helps you restore some work you thought you deleted, please reach out to me at jake@dotdot.horse!