Git – How to properly force a Git push

gitgit-non-bare-repositorygit-pushpush

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 It does force the update, but when I go back to the remote repo and make a commit, I notice that the files contain outdated changes (ones that the main remote repo previously had).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[I] tried forcing, but when going back to master server to save the changes, i get outdated staging.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?

Best Answer

Just do:

git push origin <your_branch_name> --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 <your_branch_name> -f

will also work.

Related Solutions

Git – the difference between ‘git pull’ and ‘git fetch’

In the simplest terms, git pull does a git fetch followed by a git merge.

You can do a git fetch at any time to update your remote-tracking branches under refs/remotes/<remote>/. This operation never changes any of your own local branches under refs/heads, and is safe to do without changing your working copy. I have even heard of people running git fetch periodically in a cron job in the background (although I wouldn't recommend doing this).

A git pull is what you would do to bring a local branch up-to-date with its remote version, while also updating your other remote-tracking branches.

From the Git documentation for git pull:

In its default mode, git pull is shorthand for git fetch followed by git merge FETCH_HEAD.

Git – How to undo ‘git add’ before commit

You can undo git add before commit with

git reset <file>

which will remove it from the current index (the "about to be committed" list) without changing anything else.

You can use

git reset

without any file name to unstage all due changes. This can come in handy when there are too many files to be listed one by one in a reasonable amount of time.

In old versions of Git, the above commands are equivalent to git reset HEAD <file> and git reset HEAD respectively, and will fail if HEAD is undefined (because you haven't yet made any commits in your repository) or ambiguous (because you created a branch called HEAD, which is a stupid thing that you shouldn't do). This was changed in Git 1.8.2, though, so in modern versions of Git you can use the commands above even prior to making your first commit:

"git reset" (without options or parameters) used to error out when you do not have any commits in your history, but it now gives you an empty index (to match non-existent commit you are not even on).

Documentation: git reset

Best Answer

Short flag

Related Solutions

Git – the difference between ‘git pull’ and ‘git fetch’

Git – How to undo ‘git add’ before commit

Related Topic