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
    Designing for Simplicity

    Before we get started, it's worth me spending a brief moment introducing myself to you. My name is Mark (or @integralist if Twitter happens to be your communication tool of choice) and I currently work for BBC News in London England as a principal engineer/tech...

  • By
    LightFace:  Facebook Lightbox for MooTools

    One of the web components I've always loved has been Facebook's modal dialog.  This "lightbox" isn't like others:  no dark overlay, no obnoxious animating to size, and it doesn't try to do "too much."  With Facebook's dialog in mind, I've created LightFace:  a Facebook lightbox...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Form Element AJAX Spinner Attachment Using MooTools

    Many times you'll see a form dynamically change available values based on the value of a form field. For example, a "State" field will change based on which Country a user selects. What annoys me about these forms is that they'll often do an...

  • By
    jQuery Chosen Plugin

    Without a doubt, my least favorite form element is the SELECT element.  The element is almost unstylable, looks different across platforms, has had inconsistent value access, and disaster that is the result of multiple=true is, well, a disaster.  Needless to say, whenever a developer goes...

Discussion

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