Question

Basically, I have an open pull request that I want to fix and at the same time I want to make 1 commit that contains 2 features into 2 seperate commits.

Github repository now looks like this where fix is a new branch:

master c-c-c
            \
     fix c-c-c-c

I created a pull request from fix.

I wanted to change the last commit in fix into 2 commits in my local repository as follows:

master c-c-c
            \
     fix c-c-c-n-n

where n-n are my 2 new commits.

To get to this point locally, I did this:

1. git rebase -i HEAD~2
2. Changed my last commit line to "edit", saved and closed the file
3. git reset HEAD^
4. git stash save
5. Removed the changes I don't want in the first commit
6. git commit -m "commit a" -a
7. git stash apply
8. git commit -m "commit b"

So now I have 2 commits the way I want. The problem is I found a bug that ended up in the pull request. Since I have already pushed to the remote repository, it won’t accept my new commits (as the original one is now missing).

I run:

git push origin fix --dry-run

and I get the message:

To [e-mail]:<UserName>/<Repository>.git
! [rejected]        fix -> fix (non-fast-forward)
error: failed to push some refs to '[e-mail]:<UserName>/<Repository>.git'

I have seen other posts suggest to pull my changes from origin before pushing back again, but won’t that basically reset my 2 commits back into the one?

Ideally, what I would like to do is assign the same commit ID to the last commit so it can replace the current one as is. Is there a way to do that? (Note that I didn’t run git reset with --hard)

Answer 1

When faced with that problem, a force push has worked for me:

git push --force origin fix

EDIT: Per comments below, --force-with-lease is preferred over a direct --force because it includes some protections in case there has been an intervening commit. This article describes it as "–force with a seatbelt".