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

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Making the Firefox Logo from HTML

    When each new t-shirt means staving off laundry for yet another day, swag quickly becomes the most coveted perk at any tech company. Mozilla WebDev had pretty much everything going for it: brilliant people, interesting problems, awesome office. Everything except a t-shirt. That had to change. The basic...

  • By
    Record Text Selections Using MooTools or jQuery AJAX

    One technique I'm seeing more and more these days (CNNSI.com, for example) is AJAX recording of selected text. It makes sense -- if you detect users selecting the terms over and over again, you can probably assume your visitors are searching that term on Google...

Discussion

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