How do I overwrite rather than merge a branch on another branch in Git

Question

I have two branches  email and staging  staging is the latest one and I no longer need the old changes in email branch  yet I don t want to delete them   So I just want to dump all the contents of staging into email so that they both point to the same commit  Is that possible

User · Answer

git checkout email git merge -m  Making email same as staging disregarding any conflicts from email in the process  -s recursive -X theirs staging

User · Answer

WARNING  This deletes all commits on the email branch  It s like deleting the email branch and creating it anew at the head of the staging branch   The easiest way to do it    the branch you want to overwrite git checkout email     reset to the new branch git reset --hard origin staging     push to remote git push -f  Now the email branch and the staging are the same

User · Answer

You can use the  ours  merge strategy    git checkout staging   git merge -s ours email   Merge branches  but use our   staging  branch head   git checkout email   git merge staging   EDIT 2020-07-30  I thought a bit more about this question and possible solutions  If you absolutely require the merge parents in the correct order  need perform this action with a single command line invocation  and don t mind running plumbing commands  you can do the following    git checkout A   git merge --ff-only   git commit-tree -m  quot Throw away branch  A  quot  -p A -p B B  tree    This basically acts like the  non-existent  merge -s theirs strategy  You can find the resulting history in the plumbing branch of the demo repository Not very readable and not as easy to remember compared to the -s ours switch  but it does the job  The resulting tree is again the same as branch B    git rev-parse A  tree  B  tree  HEAD  tree  3859ea064e85b2291d189e798bfa1bff87f51f3e 0389f8f2a3e560b639d82597a7bc5489a4c96d44 0389f8f2a3e560b639d82597a7bc5489a4c96d44   EDIT 2020-07-29  There seems to be a lot of confusion as to what the difference between -s ours and -X ours  equivalent to -s recursive --strategy-option ours  is  Here s a small example to show the two results from using the strategy vs the strategy option  I also recommend reading the question and answers of  Git Merging  When to use   39 ours  39  strategy    39 ours  39  option and   39 theirs  39  option  First  setup a repository with 2 branches and 3 commits  1 base commit  and 1 commit per branch   You can find the sample repository on GitHub   git init   echo  original    tee file1 file2 file3   git commit -m  initial commit    git branch A   git branch B   git checkout A   echo  A   gt  file1   git commit -m  change on branch A  file1   git checkout B   echo  B   gt  file2   git commit -m  change on branch B  file2  Now  let s try the strategy option  doesn t really matter if we use theirs or ours for this explanation     git merge -X ours A   cat file  A B original  We end up with a merge of both branches  contents  branch  quot strategy-option quot  in the sample repo   Compare that to using the merge strategy  re-init your repository or reset branch  before executing the next steps     git merge -s ours A   cat file  original B original  The result is quite different  branch  quot merge-strategy quot  in the sample repo   With the strategy option  we get a merge result of both branches  with the strategy we throw away any changes which happened in the other branch  You will also notice that the commit created by the merge-strategy in fact points to the exact same tree than the latest commit of  quot our quot  branch  while the strategy-option created a new  previously unseen tree    git rev-parse A  tree  B  tree  merge-strategy  tree  strategy-option  tree  3859ea064e85b2291d189e798bfa1bff87f51f3e 0389f8f2a3e560b639d82597a7bc5489a4c96d44 0389f8f2a3e560b639d82597a7bc5489a4c96d44 5b09d34a37a183723b409d25268c8cb4d073206e  OP indeed asked for  quot I no longer need the old changes in       branch quot  and  quot So I just want to dump all the contents of  A  into  B  quot   which is not possible to do with a strategy option  Using the  ours  merge strategy is one possibility of many  but likely the easiest  other possibilities include using low level commands of Git such as write-tree and commit-tree

User · Answer

I wanted to merge two branches so that all the contents in old branch to be updated with the contents from new branch  For me this worked like a charm     git checkout new branch   git merge -m  merge message  -s ours origin old branch   git checkout old branch   git merge new branch   git push origin old branch

User · Answer

What you want is this  actually the exact inverse  of the currently accepted answer   git checkout email git merge --strategy-option theirs staging    What this does is   email branch files will now be exactly the same as staging branch email branch s history will be maintained staging branch s history will be added to email history   As added value  if you don t want all of staging branch s history  you can use squash to summarize it into a single commit message  git checkout email git merge --squash --strategy-option theirs staging   git commit -m  quot Single commit message for squash branch s history here   So in summary  what this second version does is   email branch files will now be exactly the same as staging branch email branch s history will be maintained A single commit will be added on top of email branch s history  This commit will represent ALL the changes that took place in the staging branch

User · Answer

Other answers looked incomplete  I have tried below in full  and it worked fine   NOTE  1  Make a copy of your repository before you try below  to be on safe side     Details  1  All development happens in dev branch 2  qa branch is just the same copy of dev 3  Time to time  dev code needs to be moved overwrite to qa branch    so we need to overwrite qa branch  from dev branch  Part 1  With below commands  old qa has been updated to newer dev     git checkout dev git merge -s ours qa git checkout qa git merge dev git push   Automatic comment for last push gives below        Output        lt MYNAME gt  Merge branch  qa  into dev       This comment looks reverse  because above sequence also looks reverse  Part 2     Below are unexpected  new local commits in dev  the unnecessary ones so  we need to throw away  and make dev untouched     git checkout dev     Output      Switched to branch  dev        Your branch is ahead of  origin dev  by 15 commits         use  git push  to publish your local commits    git reset --hard origin dev        Now we threw away the unexpected commits   Part 3  Verify everything is as expected     git status       Output       On branch dev       Your branch is up-to-date with  origin dev         nothing to commit  working tree clean      That s all  1  old qa is now overwritten by new dev branch code 2  local is clean  remote origin dev is untouched

User · Answer

I tried  knittl s write-tree commit-tree approach  branch-a  the kept branch branch-b  the abandoned branch    goto branch-a branch   git checkout branch-a    git write-tree 6fa6989240d2fc6490f8215682a20c63dac5560a    echo tree id  I guess    git commit-tree  -p branch-a -p branch-b 6fa6989240d2fc6490f8215682a20c63dac5560a  lt type some commit message end with Ctrl-d gt  20bc36a2b0f2537ed11328d1aedd9c3cff2e87e9    echo new commit id    git reset --hard 20bc36a2b0f2537ed11328d1aedd9c3cff2e87e9

User · Answer

This one doesn t alter the original newer branch  and gives you the opportunity to make further modifications before final commit   git checkout new -b tmp git merge -s ours old -m  irrelevant  git checkout old git merge --squash tmp git branch -D tmp  do any other stuff you want git add -A  git commit -m  foo   commit  or however you like

User · Answer

If you re like me and you don t want to deal with merging  you can do the above steps  except use force instead of merge  because it will create a distracting log paper trail   git checkout email git reset --hard staging git push origin email --force   Note  This is only if you REALLY never want to see the stuff in email again

User · Answer

How about   git branch -D email git checkout staging git checkout -b email git push origin email --force-with-lease

User · Answer

I ve seen several answers and that s the only procedure that let me fix that without any conflicts   If you want all changes from branch new in branch old  then   git checkout branch new git merge -s ours branch old git checkout branch old git merge branch new   once applied those four commands you can push the branch old without any problem

User · Answer

The other answers gave me the right clues  but they didn t completely help   Here s what worked for me     git checkout email   git tag old-email-branch   This is optional   git reset --hard staging       Using a custom commit message for the merge below   git merge -m  Merge -s our where  ours  is the branch staging  -s ours origin email   git push origin email   Without the fourth step of merging with the ours strategy  the push is considered a non-fast-forward update and will be rejected  by GitHub

User · Answer

If you just want the two branches  email  and  staging  to be the same  you can tag the  email  branch  then reset the  email  branch to the  staging  one     git checkout email   git tag old-email-branch   git reset --hard staging   You can also rebase the  staging  branch on the  email  branch  But the result will contains the modification of the two branches

[git] How do I 'overwrite', rather than 'merge', a branch on another branch in Git?

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