Force git push to overwrite remote files

Question

I want to push my local files  and have them on a remote repo  without having to deal with merge conflicts  I just want my local version to have priority over the remote one   How can I do this with Git

User · Answer

You want to force push

What you basically want to do is to force push your local branch, in order to overwrite the remote one.

If you want a more detailed explanation of each of the following commands, then see my details section below. You basically have 4 different options for force pushing with Git:

git push <remote> <branch> -f
git push origin master -f # Example

git push <remote> -f
git push origin -f # Example

git push -f

git push <remote> <branch> --force-with-lease

If you want a more detailed explanation of each command, then see my long answers section below.

Warning: force pushing will overwrite the remote branch with the state of the branch that you're pushing. Make sure that this is what you really want to do before you use it, otherwise you may overwrite commits that you actually want to keep.

Force pushing details

Specifying the remote and branch

You can completely specify specific branches and a remote. The -f flag is the short version of --force

git push <remote> <branch> --force
git push <remote> <branch> -f

Omitting the branch

When the branch to push branch is omitted, Git will figure it out based on your config settings. In Git versions after 2.0, a new repo will have default settings to push the currently checked-out branch:

git push <remote> --force

while prior to 2.0, new repos will have default settings to push multiple local branches. The settings in question are the remote.<remote>.push and push.default settings (see below).

Omitting the remote and the branch

When both the remote and the branch are omitted, the behavior of just git push --force is determined by your push.default Git config settings:

git push --force

As of Git 2.0, the default setting, simple, will basically just push your current branch to its upstream remote counter-part. The remote is determined by the branch's branch.<remote>.remote setting, and defaults to the origin repo otherwise.
Before Git version 2.0, the default setting, matching, basically just pushes all of your local branches to branches with the same name on the remote (which defaults to origin).

You can read more push.default settings by reading git help config or an online version of the git-config(1) Manual Page.

Force pushing more safely with `--force-with-lease`

Force pushing with a "lease" allows the force push to fail if there are new commits on the remote that you didn't expect (technically, if you haven't fetched them into your remote-tracking branch yet), which is useful if you don't want to accidentally overwrite someone else's commits that you didn't even know about yet, and you just want to overwrite your own:

git push <remote> <branch> --force-with-lease

You can learn more details about how to use --force-with-lease by reading any of the following:

User · Answer

Simple steps by using tortoisegit  GIT giving local files commit and pushing into git repository   Steps    1  stash changes               stash name  2  pull  3  stash pop  4  commit            1 or more files and give commit changes description set author and Date  5  push

User · Answer

Another option  to avoid any forced push which can be problematic for other contributors  is to    put your new commits in a dedicated branch reset your master on origin master merge your dedicated branch to master  always keeping commits from the dedicated branch  meaning creating new revisions on top of master which will mirror your dedicated branch   See  git command for making one branch like another  for strategies to simulate a git merge --strategy theirs    That way  you can push master to remote without having to force anything

User · Answer

git push -f is a bit destructive because it resets any remote changes that had been made by anyone else on the team  A safer option is  git push --force-with-lease    What  --force-with-lease  does is refuse to update a branch unless it is the state that we expect  i e  nobody has updated the branch upstream  In practice this works by checking that the upstream ref is what we expect  because refs are hashes  and implicitly encode the chain of parents into their value  You can tell  --force-with-lease  exactly what to check for  but by default will check the current remote ref  What this means in practice is that when Alice updates her branch and pushes it up to the remote repository  the ref pointing head of the branch will be updated  Now  unless Bob does a pull from the remote  his local reference to the remote will be out of date  When he goes to push using  --force-with-lease   git will check the local ref against the new remote and refuse to force the push   --force-with-lease  effectively only allows you to force-push if no-one else has pushed changes up to the remote in the interim  It s  --force  with the seatbelt on

User · Answer

Works for me   git push --set-upstream origin master -f

User · Answer

You should be able to force your local revision to the remote repo by using   git push -f  lt remote gt   lt branch gt     e g  git push -f origin master   Leaving off  lt remote gt  and  lt branch gt  will force push all local branches that have set --set-upstream   Just be warned  if other people are sharing this repository their revision history will conflict with the new one  And if they have any local commits after the point of change they will become invalid   Update  Thought I would add a side-note  If you are creating changes that others will review  then it s not uncommon to create a branch with those changes and rebase periodically to keep them up-to-date with the main development branch  Just let other developers know this will happen periodically so they ll know what to expect   Update 2  Because of the increasing number of viewers I d like to add some additional information on what to do when your upstream does experience a force push   Say I ve cloned your repo and have added a few commits like so                D----E  topic              A----B----C         development   But later the development branch is hit with a rebase  which will cause me to receive an error like so when I run git pull    Unpacking objects  100   3 3   done  From  lt repo-location gt     branch            development     -  FETCH HEAD Auto-merging  lt files gt  CONFLICT  content   Merge conflict in  lt locations gt  Automatic merge failed  fix conflicts and then commit the result    Here I could fix the conflicts and commit  but that would leave me with a really ugly commit history           C----D----E----F    topic                        A----B--------------C   development   It might look enticing to use git pull --force but be careful because that ll leave you with stranded commits                D----E   topic  A----B----C          development   So probably the best option is to do a git pull --rebase  This will require me to resolve any conflicts like before  but for each step instead of committing I ll use git rebase --continue  In the end the commit history will look much better                D ---E   topic              A----B----C          development   Update 3  You can also use the --force-with-lease option as a  safer  force push  as mentioned by Cupcake in his answer      Force pushing with a  lease  allows the force push to fail if there   are new commits on the remote that you didn t expect  technically  if   you haven t fetched them into your remote-tracking branch yet   which   is useful if you don t want to accidentally overwrite someone else s   commits that you didn t even know about yet  and you just want to   overwrite your own   git push  lt remote gt   lt branch gt  --force-with-lease       You can learn more details about how to use --force-with-lease by   reading any of the following          git push documentation   Git  How to ignore fast forward and revert origin  branch  to earlier commit

[git] Force "git push" to overwrite remote files

You want to force push

Force pushing details

Specifying the remote and branch

Omitting the branch

Omitting the remote and the branch

Force pushing more safely with `--force-with-lease`

Examples related to git

Examples related to git-push

[git] Force "git push" to overwrite remote files

You want to force push

Force pushing details

Specifying the remote and branch

Omitting the branch

Omitting the remote and the branch

Force pushing more safely with --force-with-lease

Examples related to git

Examples related to git-push

Force pushing more safely with `--force-with-lease`