If you have any files that are not tracked by Git (e.g. uploaded user content), these files will not be affected.
First, run a fetch to update all origin/<branch>
refs to latest:
git fetch --all
Backup your current branch:
git branch backup-master
Then, you have two options:
git reset --hard origin/master
OR If you are on some other branch:
git reset --hard origin/<branch_name>
Explanation:
git fetch
downloads the latest from remote without trying to merge or rebase anything.
Then the git reset
resets the master branch to what you just fetched. The --hard
option changes all the files in your working tree to match the files in origin/master
Maintain current local commits
[*]: It’s worth noting that it is possible to maintain current local commits by creating a branch from master
before resetting:
git checkout master
git branch new-branch-to-save-current-commits
git fetch --all
git reset --hard origin/master
After this, all of the old commits will be kept in new-branch-to-save-current-commits
.
Uncommitted changes
Uncommitted changes, however (even staged), will be lost. Make sure to stash and commit anything you need. For that you can run the following:
git stash
And then to reapply these uncommitted changes:
git stash pop
Sometimes just clean -f
does not help. In case you have untracked DIRECTORIES, -d option also needed:
# WARNING: this can't be undone!
git reset --hard HEAD
git clean -f -d
git pull
WARNING: git clean
deletes all your untracked files/directories and can’t be undone.
Consider using -n
(--dry-run
) flag first. This will show you what will be deleted without actually deleting anything:
git clean -n -f -d
Example output:
Would remove untracked-file-1.txt
Would remove untracked-file-2.txt
Would remove untracked/folder
...
Instead of doing:
git fetch --all
git reset --hard origin/master
I’d advise doing the following:
git fetch origin master
git reset --hard origin/master
No need to fetch all remotes and branches if you’re going to reset to the origin/master branch right?