Reset a Branch to Remote State with git

By  on  

Every once in a while I accidentally hose my repository's master branch by merging or committing something I shouldn't.  And then on rare occasion I push that to my remote and then things get all sorts of messed up.  Every PR from that point on has some wonky commits and I look like a noob.  Sometimes the best course of action is to just reset to the a remote branch's master (i.e. the repository I forked the project from) and get on with life that way.  Here's how to do so:

git fetch some-remote   # "origin" if you want to use your own branch
git reset --hard some-remote/master

The first step is fetching a list of branches from the remote.  The next is executing a hard reset of the branch based on the remote.

Now you can stop asking yourself how things got so messed and up can get back to business!

Recent Features

  • By
    Vibration API

    Many of the new APIs provided to us by browser vendors are more targeted toward the mobile user than the desktop user.  One of those simple APIs the Vibration API.  The Vibration API allows developers to direct the device, using JavaScript, to vibrate in...

  • By
    Create a CSS Cube

    CSS cubes really showcase what CSS has become over the years, evolving from simple color and dimension directives to a language capable of creating deep, creative visuals.  Add animation and you've got something really neat.  Unfortunately each CSS cube tutorial I've read is a bit...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    jQuery topLink Plugin

    Last week I released a snippet of code for MooTools that allowed you to fade in and out a "to the top" link on any page. Here's how to implement that functionality using jQuery. The XHTML A simple link. The CSS A little CSS for position and style. The jQuery...

  • By
    Image Data URIs with PHP

    If you troll page markup like me, you've no doubt seen the use of data URI's within image src attributes. Instead of providing a traditional address to the image, the image file data is base64-encoded and stuffed within the src attribute. Doing so saves...

Discussion

    Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!