Clean up a fork and restart it from the upstream

Question

I have forked a repository  then I made some changes and it looks like I ve messed up everything     I wish to start it again from scratch  using the current upstream master as the base for my work  Should I rebase my repository or delete it at all

User · Answer

How to do it 100  through the Sourcetree GUI   Not everyone likes doing things through the git command line interface      Once this has been set up  you only need to do steps 7-13 from then on       Fetch   checkout master branch   reset to their master   Push changes to server   Steps   In the menu toolbar at the top of the screen   Repository     Repository settings        Add       Go back to GitHub and copy the clone URL       Paste the url into the  URL   Path  field then give it a name that makes sense  I called it  master   Do not check the  Default remote  checkbox  You will not be able to push directly to this repository       Press  OK  and you should see it appear in your list of repositories now       Press  OK  again and you should see it appear in your list of  Remotes        Click the  Fetch  button  top left of the Source tree header area       Make sure the  Fetch from all remotes  checkbox is checked and press  ok       Double click on your  master  branch to check it out if it is not checked out already  Find the commit that you want to reset to  if you called the repo  master  you will most likely want to find the commit with the  master master  tag on it       Right click on the commit    Reset current branch to this commit   In the dialog  set the  Using mode   field to  Hard - discard all working copy changes  then press  OK   make sure to put any changes that you don t want to lose onto a separate branch first        Click the  Push  button  top left of the Source tree header area  to upload the changes to your copy of the repo      Your Done

User · Answer

Following  VonC great answer  Your GitHub company policy might not allow  force push  on master    remote  error  GH003  Sorry  force-pushing to master is not allowed   If you get an error message like this one please try the following steps    To effectively reset your fork you need to follow these steps    git checkout master git reset --hard upstream master git checkout -b tmp master git push origin   Open your fork on GitHub  in  Settings -  Branches -  Default branch  choose  new master  as the new default branch  Now you can force push on the  master  branch    git checkout master git push --force origin   Then you must set back  master  as the default branch in the GitHub settings  To delete  tmp master      git push origin --delete tmp master git branch -D tmp master   Other answers warning about lossing your change still apply  be carreful

User · Answer

The simplest solution would be  using  upstream  as the remote name referencing the original repo forked    git remote add upstream  url to original repo git fetch upstream git checkout master git reset --hard upstream master   git push origin master --force     Similar to this GitHub page  section  What should I do if I   m in a bad situation     Be aware that you can lose changes done on the master branch  both locally  because of the reset --hard  and on the remote side  because of the push --force    An alternative would be  if you want to preserve your commits on master  to replay those commits on top of the current upstream master  Replace the reset part by a git rebase upstream master  You will then still need to force push  See also  What should I do if I   m in a bad situation      A more complete solution  backing up your current work  just in case  is detailed in  Cleanup git master branch and move some commit to new branch    See also  Pull new updates from original GitHub repository into forked GitHub repository  for illustrating what  upstream  is       Note  recent GitHub repos do protect the master branch against push --force  So you will have to un-protect master first  see picture below   and then re-protect it after force-pushing        Note  on GitHub specifically  there is now  February 2019  a shortcut to delete forked repos for pull requests that have been merged upstream

User · Answer

Love VonC s answer  Here s an easy version of it for beginners    There is a git remote called origin which I am sure you are all aware of  Basically  you can add as many remotes to a git repo as you want  So  what we can do is introduce a new remote which is the original repo not the fork  I like to call it original   Let s add original repo s to our fork as a remote   git remote add original https   git-repo original original git   Now let s fetch the original repo to make sure we have the latest coded  git fetch original   As  VonC suggested  make sure we are on the master    git checkout master   Now to bring our fork up to speed with the latest code on original repo  all we have to do is hard reset our master branch in accordance with the original remote   git reset --hard original master   And you are done

[git] Clean up a fork and restart it from the upstream

How to do it 100% through the Sourcetree GUI

Steps

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