How do I properly force a Git push

Question

I ve set up a remote non-bare  main  repo and cloned it to my computer  I made some local changes  updated my local repository  and pushed the changes back to my remote repo  Things were fine up to that point   Now  I had to change something in the remote repo  Then I changed something in my local repo  I realized that the change to the remote repo was not needed  So I tried to git push from my local repo to my remote repo  but I got an error like      To prevent you from losing history  non-fast-forward updates were   rejected Merge the remote changes before pushing again   See the  Note   about fast-forwards  section of git push --help for details    I thought that probably a  git push --force   would force my local copy to push changes to the remote one and make it the same  It does force the update  but when I go back to the remote repo and make a commit  I notice that the files contain outdated changes  ones that the main remote repo previously had    As I mentioned in the comments to one of the answers       I  tried forcing  but when going back to master server to save the changes  i get outdated staging  Thus  when i commit the repositories are not the same  And when i try to use git push again  i get the same error    How can I fix this issue

User · Answer

This was our solution for replacing master on a corporate gitHub repository while maintaining history.

push -f to master on corporate repositories is often disabled to maintain branch history. This solution worked for us.

git fetch desiredOrigin
git checkout -b master desiredOrigin/master // get origin master

git checkout currentBranch  // move to target branch
git merge -s ours master  // merge using ours over master
// vim will open for the commit message
git checkout master  // move to master
git merge currentBranch  // merge resolved changes into master

push your branch to desiredOrigin and create a PR

User · Answer

I would really recommend to    push only to the main repo make sure that main repo is a bare repo  in order to never have any problem with the main repo working tree being not in sync with its  git base  See  How to push a local git repository to another computer   If you do have to make modification in the main  bare  repo  clone it  on the main server   do your modification and push back to it   In other words  keep a bare repo accessible both from the main server and the local computer  in order to have a single upstream repo from to which to pull pull

User · Answer

I had the same question but figured it out finally  What you most likely need to do is run the following two git commands  replacing hash with the git commit revision number    git checkout  lt hash gt  git push -f HEAD master

User · Answer

First of all  I would not make any changes directly in the  main  repo  If you really want to have a  main  repo  then you should only push to it  never change it directly   Regarding the error you are getting  have you tried git pull from your local repo  and then git push to the main repo  What you are currently doing  if I understood it well  is forcing the push and then losing your changes in the  main  repo  You should merge the changes locally first

User · Answer

use this following command   git push -f origin master

User · Answer

And if push --force doesn t work you can do push --delete  Look at 2nd line on this instance  git reset --hard HEAD 3    reset current branch to 3 commits ago git push origin master --delete    do a very very bad bad thing git push origin master    regular push  But beware    Never ever go back on a public git history  In other words   Don t ever force push on a public repository  Don t do this or anything that can break someone s pull  Don t ever reset or rewrite history in a repo someone might have already pulled   Of course there are exceptionally rare exceptions even to this rule  but in most cases it s not needed to do it and it will generate problems to everyone else  Do a revert instead  And always be careful with what you push to a public repo  Reverting  git revert -n HEAD 3  HEAD    prepare a new commit reverting last 3 commits git commit -m  quot sorry - revert last 3 commits because I was not careful quot  git push origin master    regular push  In effect  both origin HEADs  from the revert and from the evil reset  will contain the same files   edit to add updated info and more arguments around push --force Consider pushing force with lease instead of push  but still prefer revert Another problem push --force may bring is when someone push anything before you do  but after you ve already fetched  If you push force your rebased version now you will replace work from others  git push --force-with-lease introduced in the git 1 8 5  thanks to  VonC comment on the question  tries to address this specific issue  Basically  it will bring an error and not push if the remote was modified since your latest fetch  This is good if you re really sure a push --force is needed  but still want to prevent more problems  I d go as far to say it should be the default push --force behaviour  But it s still far from being an excuse to force a push  People who fetched before your rebase will still have lots of troubles  which could be easily avoided if you had reverted instead  And since we re talking about git --push instances    Why would anyone want to force push   linquize brought a good push force example on the comments  sensitive data  You ve wrongly leaked data that shouldn t be pushed  If you re fast enough  you can  quot fix quot   it by forcing a push on top    The data will still be on the remote unless you also do a garbage collect  or clean it somehow  There is also the obvious potential for it to be spread by others who d fetched it already  but you get the idea

User · Answer

Just do   git push origin  lt your branch name gt  --force   or if you have a specific repo   git push https   git     --force   This will delete your previous commit s  and push your current one   It may not be proper  but if anyone stumbles upon this page  thought they might want a simple solution     Short flag  Also note that -f is short for --force  so  git push origin  lt your branch name gt  -f   will also work

User · Answer

If I m on my local branch A  and I want to force push local branch B to the origin branch C I can use the following syntax   git push --force origin B C

[git] How do I properly force a Git push?

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