How to replace local branch with remote branch entirely in Git

Question

I have two branches    local branch  the one which I work with  remote branch  public  only well-tested commits go there    Recently I seriously messed up my local branch   How would I replace the local branch entirely with the remote one  so I can continue my work from where the remote branch is now   I have already searched SO and checking out to the remote branch locally does not have any effect

User · Answer

I m kind of surprised no one mentioned this yet  I use it nearly every day   git reset --hard   u    Basically    u  is just shorthand for the upstream branch that your current branch is tracking  For example  this typically equates to origin  my-current-branch-name   It s nice because it s branch agnostic   Make sure to git fetch first to get the latest copy of the remote branch

User · Answer

You can do as  Hugo of  Laurent said  or you can use git rebase to delete the commits you want to get rid off  if you know which ones  I tend to use git rebase -i head N  where N is a number  allowing you to manipulate the last N commits  for this kind of operations

User · Answer

The selected answer is absolutely correct  however it did not leave me with the latest commit pushes      So for me    git reset --hard dev jobmanager-tools git pull    did not work as git was not sure what branch i wanted    Since I know I want to temporarily set my upstream branch for a few weeks to a specific branch   same as the one i switched to   checked out earlier and did a hard reset on     So AFTER reset  git branch --set-upstream-to origin dev jobmanager-tools git pull git status      says-- gt  on branch  dev jobmanager-tools

User · Answer

The ugly but simpler way  delete your local folder  and clone the remote repository again

User · Answer

That s as easy as three steps      Delete your local branch  git branch -d local branch    Fetch the latest remote branch  git fetch origin remote branch   Rebuild the local branch based on the remote one  git checkout -b local branch origin remote branch

User · Answer

git branch -D  lt branch-name gt  git fetch  lt remote gt   lt branch-name gt  git checkout -b  lt branch-name gt  --track  lt remote gt   lt branch-name gt

User · Answer

git checkout   i always use this command to replace my local changes with repository changes  git checkout space dot

User · Answer

It can be done multiple ways  continuing to edit this answer for spreading better knowledge perspective   1  Reset hard  If you are working from remote develop branch  you can reset HEAD to the last commit on remote branch as below   git reset --hard origin develop   2  Delete current branch  and checkout again from the remote repository  Considering  you are working on develop branch in local repo  that syncs with remote develop branch  you can do as below   git branch -D develop git checkout -b develop origin develop   3  Abort Merge  If you are in-between a bad merge  mistakenly done with wrong branch   and wanted to avoid the merge to go back to the branch latest as below   git merge --abort   4  Abort Rebase  If you are in-between a bad rebase  you can abort the rebase request as below   git rebase --abort

User · Answer

As provided in chosen explanation  git reset is good  But nowadays we often use sub-modules  repositories inside repositories  For example  you if you use ZF3 and jQuery in your project you most probably want them to be cloned from their original repositories  In such case git reset is not enough  We need to update submodules to that exact version that are defined in our repository   git checkout master git fetch origin master git reset --hard origin master git pull  git submodule foreach git submodule update  git status   it is the same as you will come  cd  recursively to the working directory of each sub-module and will run   git submodule update   And it s very different from   git checkout master git pull   because sub-modules point not to branch but to the commit   In that cases when you manually checkout some branch for 1 or more submodules you can run  git submodule foreach git pull

User · Answer

Replace everything with the remote branch  but  only from the same commit your local branch is on   git reset --hard origin some-branch   OR  get the latest from the remote branch and replace everything   git fetch origin some-branch git reset --hard FETCH HEAD   As an aside  if needed  you can wipe out untracked files  amp  directories that you haven t committed yet   git clean -fd

User · Answer

The safest and most complete way to replace the current local branch with the remote   git stash git merge --abort git rebase --abort git branch -M yourBranch replaced yourBranch git fetch origin yourBranch yourBranch git checkout yourBranch   The stash line saves the changes that you have not committed  The branch line moves your branch to a different name  freeing up the original name  The fetch line retrieves the latest copy of the remote  The checkout line recreates the original branch as a tracking branch   Or as a bash function   replaceWithRemote         yourBranch   1 - git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD       git stash     git merge --abort     git rebase --abort     git branch -M   yourBranch  replaced   yourBranch   git rev-parse --short HEAD      git fetch origin   yourBranch    yourBranch      git checkout   yourBranch      which renames the current branch to something like replaced master 98d258f

User · Answer

Make sure you ve checked out the branch you re replacing  from Zolt  n s comment   Assuming that master is the local branch you re replacing  and that  origin master  is the remote branch you want to reset to   git reset --hard origin master    This updates your local HEAD branch to be the same revision as origin master  and --hard will sync this change into the index and workspace as well

User · Answer

git reset --hard git clean -fd   This worked for me - clean showed all the files it deleted too  If it tells you you ll lose changes  you need to stash

User · Answer

If you want to update branch that is not currently checked out you can do   git fetch -f origin rbranch lbranch

[git] How to replace local branch with remote branch entirely in Git?

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