Git reset --hard and push to remote repository

Question

I had a repository that had some bad commits on it  D  E and F for this example       A-B-C-D-E-F master and origin master   I ve modified the local repository specifically with a git reset --hard   I took a branch before the reset so now I have a repo that looks like   A-B-C master          D-E-F old master  A-B-C-D-E-F origin master   Now I needed some parts of those bad commits so I cherry picked the bits I needed and made some new commits so now I have the following locally   A-B-C-G-H master        D-E-F old master   Now I want to push this state of affairs to the remote repo  However  when I try to do a git push Git politely gives me the brush off     git push origin  master master --force   Total 0  delta 0   reused 0  delta 0    error  denying non-fast forward refs heads master  you should pull first    To git git example com myrepo git      remote rejected  master - gt  master  non-fast forward    error  failed to push some refs to  git git example com myrepo git      How do I get the remote repo to take the current state of the local repo

User · Accepted Answer

If forcing a push doesn t help   git push --force origin  or  git push --force origin master  should be enough   it might mean that the remote server is refusing non fast-forward pushes either via receive denyNonFastForwards config variable  see git config manpage for description   or via update   pre-receive hook   With older Git you can work around that restriction by deleting  git push origin  master   see the     before branch name  and then re-creating  git push origin master  given branch   If you can t change this  then the only solution would be instead of rewriting history to create a commit reverting changes in D-E-F    A-B-C-D-E-F-  D-E-F  -1    master  A-B-C-D-E-F                             origin master

User · Answer

For users of GitHub  this worked for me    In any branch protection rules where you wish to make the change  make sure Allow force pushes is enabled git reset --hard  lt full hash of commit to reset to gt  git push --force   This will  correct  the branch history on your local machine and the GitHub server  but anyone who has sync ed this branch with the server since the bad commit will have the history on their local machine  If they have permission to push to the branch directly then these commits will show right back up when they sync   All everyone else needs to do is the git reset command from above to  correct  the branch on their local machine  Of course they would need to be wary of any local commits made to this branch after the target hash  Cherry pick backup and reapply those as necessary  but if you are in a protected branch then the number of people who can commit directly to it is likely limited

User · Answer

Instead of fixing your  master  branch  it s way easier to swap it with your  desired-master  by renaming the branches   See https   stackoverflow com a 2862606 2321594  This way you wouldn t even leave any trace of multiple revert logs

User · Answer

To complement Jakub s answer  if you have access to the remote git server in ssh  you can go into the git remote directory and set   user remote  git config receive denyNonFastforwards false   Then go back to your local repo  try again to do your commit with --force   user local  git push origin  master master --force   And finally revert the server s setting in the original protected state   user remote  git config receive denyNonFastforwards true

User · Answer

The whole git resetting business looked far to complicating for me   So I did something along the lines to get my src folder in the state i had a few commits ago    reset the local state git reset  lt somecommit gt  --hard    copy the relevant part e g  src  exclude is only needed if you specify    tar cvfz  tmp current tgz --exclude  git  src   get the current state of git git pull   remove what you don t like anymore rm -rf src   restore from the tar file tar xvfz  tmp current tgz   commit everything back to git git commit -a   now you can properly push git push   This way the state of affairs in the src is kept in a tar file and git is forced to accept this state without too much fiddling basically the src directory is replaced with the state it had several commits ago

[git] Git reset --hard and push to remote repository

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