I have two branches in my Git repository:
master
seotweaks
(created originally from master
)I created seotweaks
with the intention of quickly merging it back into master
. However, that was three months ago and the code in this branch is 13 versions ahead of master
.
It has effectively become our working master branch as all the code in master
is more or less obsolete now.
Very bad practice I know, lesson learned.
Do you know how I can replace all of the contents of the master
branch with those in seotweaks
?
I could just delete everything in master
and merge, but this does not feel like best practice.
git checkout seotweaks -- *
then run, git commit -m "Replaced contents of master with seotweaks"
finally run git push
- anyone You should be able to use the “ours” merge strategy to overwrite master with seotweaks like this:
git checkout master
git pull
git checkout seotweaks
git merge -s ours master
git checkout master
git merge seotweaks
The first two steps are a useful precaution to ensure your local copy of master is up-to-date. The result should be that your master is now essentially seotweaks.
(-s ours
is short for --strategy=ours
)
From the docs about the 'ours' strategy:
This resolves any number of heads, but the resulting tree of the merge is always that of the current branch head, effectively ignoring all changes from all other branches. It is meant to be used to supersede old development history of side branches. Note that this is different from the -Xours option to the recursive merge strategy.
Update from comments: If you get fatal: refusing to merge unrelated histories
, then change the second line to this: git merge --allow-unrelated-histories -s ours master
Answered 2023-09-20 20:57:35
fatal: refusing to merge unrelated histories
, then change the second line to this: git merge --allow-unrelated-histories -s ours master
- anyone What about using git branch -m to rename the master branch to another one, then rename seotweaks branch to master? Something like this:
git branch -m master old-master
git branch -m seotweaks master
git push -f origin master
This might remove commits in origin master, please check your origin master before running git push -f origin master
.
Answered 2023-09-20 20:57:35
git push -f origin master
- anyone master
branch. While ergosys' solution does a proper merge and so retains all history in master
. - anyone git checkout old-master && git push origin old-master
to create a branch with the old master. - anyone You can rename/remove master on remote, but this will be an issue if lots of people have based their work on the remote master branch and have pulled that branch in their local repo.
That might not be the case here since everyone seems to be working on branch 'seotweaks
'.
In that case you can:
git remote --show
may not work.
(Make a git remote show
to check how your remote is declared within your local repo. I will assume 'origin
')
(Regarding GitHub, house9 comments: "I had to do one additional step, click the 'Admin
' button on GitHub and set the 'Default Branch
' to something other than 'master
', then put it back afterwards")
git branch -m master master-old # rename master on local
git push origin :master # delete master on remote
git push origin master-old # create master-old on remote
git checkout -b master seotweaks # create a new local master on top of seotweaks
git push origin master # create master on remote
But again:
no such ref on remote
")master
is recreated on remote, a pull will attempt to merge that new master
on their local (now old) master
: lots of conflicts. They actually need to reset --hard
their local master to the remote/master
branch they will fetch, and forget about their current master
.Update/Note 2022:
master
would nowodays be named main
git switch
for branch operation. git branch -m main main-old # rename main on local
git push origin :main # delete main on remote
git push origin main-old # create main-old on remote
git switch -c main seotweaks # create a new local main on top of seotweaks
git push origin main # create main on remote
Answered 2023-09-20 20:57:35
git push -f origin :master
. - anyone Since seotweaks
was originally created as a branch from master
, merging it back in is a good idea. However if you are in a situation where one of your branches is not really a branch from master
or your history is so different that you just want to obliterate the master
branch in favor of the new branch that you've been doing the work on you can do this:
git push [-f] origin seotweaks:master
This is especially helpful if you are getting this error:
! [remote rejected] master (deletion of the current branch prohibited)
And you are not using GitHub and don't have access to the "Administration" tab to change the default branch for your remote repository. Furthermore, this won't cause down time or race conditions as you may encounter by deleting master:
git push origin :master
Answered 2023-09-20 20:57:35
master
git history looks like after force push
? Does it overwrite all files on master
even when they weren't changed on seotweaks
? - anyone I found this to be the best way of doing this (I had an issue with my server not letting me delete).
On the server that hosts the origin
repository, type the following from a directory inside the repository:
git config receive.denyDeleteCurrent ignore
On your workstation:
git branch -m master vabandoned # Rename master on local
git branch -m newBranch master # Locally rename branch newBranch to master
git push origin :master # Delete the remote's master
git push origin master:refs/heads/master # Push the new master to the remote
git push origin abandoned:refs/heads/abandoned # Push the old master to the remote
Back on the server that hosts the origin
repository:
git config receive.denyDeleteCurrent true
Credit to the author of blog post http://www.mslinn.com/blog/?p=772
Answered 2023-09-20 20:57:35