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I am working on a git repository by myself (so yes, I know the implications and the warnings of doing this) and somehow one of the trees got a commit after being pushed when it shouldn't have.

Now I'm trying to pull back and it's complaining about hundreds of merge conflicts.

Is there a way to tell git to forcefully overwrite any and all files locally that are coming from the remote server? Is there a faster way than doing git reset --hard HEAD~1 and then doing the pull?

On that same note, is there a way to do the same with with a simple merge? Everything I've seen suggests to check out each and every file during the merge conflict resolution stage, but with hundreds of files it's just not possible to do so manually.

Qix - MONICA WAS MISTREATED
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2 Answers2

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There are three simple solutions to copy the last version that is in you remote repository, discarding all changes that you have made locally:

  1. Discard your repository and clone again. This is the most simple solution, but if your repository is big, it can take a long time, and may require extra effort like reconfigureing, etc.

  2. Discard the local changes with git reset --hard <hash> and then do a git pull. The problem is you need to first find a commit that precedes whatever change history you are trying to avoid. After resetting to that commit hash, do a git pull.

  3. Do a git fetch to bring the updates to your local reference of the remote branch (usually origin/master) and then do a git reset --hard passing this reference, ie, git reset --hard origin/master.

rogerdpack
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William Seiti Mizuta
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    #3 was pretty smart. Good answer. Welcome to StackOverflow, by the way. Just a note: use back-quotes (`) to denote code or command line stuff. – Qix - MONICA WAS MISTREATED Jan 10 '13 at 03:45
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    `git checkout --theirs .` seems to work if the merge does not include any deletions – Alex R Dec 23 '14 at 13:45
  • Years later and I've determined #3 to be _the definitive_ correct answer. Learning how `fetch` and refs work is very important to using Git effectively. – Qix - MONICA WAS MISTREATED Nov 24 '18 at 14:34
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    After running the `git fetch origin my_branch`, then trying `git reset --hard origin/my_branch` I get the following error: `fatal: ambiguous argument 'origin/my_branch': unknown revision or path not in the working tree.` Is the issue with the "`working tree`" bit? – elPastor Nov 24 '18 at 18:25
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git reset --hard {remote_repository_name}/{branch_name}

Example: 

git reset --hard upstream/branch1

If you are working with a branch you can use the above code.But before that, you have to set (upstream or origin) to your local repository,

git remote add upstream https://github.com/lakini/example.git

here,https://github.com/lakini/example.git is the remote upstream repository.

Same as like this we can work in the remote repository(origin) as well.

git reset --hard origin/branch1
Sithara
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