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
    Welcome to My New Office

    My first professional web development was at a small print shop where I sat in a windowless cubical all day. I suffered that boxed in environment for almost five years before I was able to find a remote job where I worked from home. The first...

  • By
    Page Visibility API

    One event that's always been lacking within the document is a signal for when the user is looking at a given tab, or another tab. When does the user switch off our site to look at something else? When do they come back?

Incredible Demos

Discussion

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