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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-12T13:11:41+00:00

I had a repository that had some bad commits on it (D, E and

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I had a repository that had some bad commits on it (D, E and F for this example).

A-B-C-D-E-F master and origin/master

I’ve modified the local repository specifically with a git reset --hard. I took a branch before the reset so now I have a repo that looks like:

A-B-C master  
     \ D-E-F old_master

A-B-C-D-E-F origin/master

Now I needed some parts of those bad commits so I cherry picked the bits I needed and made some new commits so now I have the following locally:

A-B-C-G-H master
     \ D-E-F old_master

Now I want to push this state of affairs to the remote repo. However, when I try to do a git push Git politely gives me the brush off:

$ git push origin +master:master --force  
Total 0 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)  
error: denying non-fast forward refs/heads/master (you should pull first)  
To git@git.example.com:myrepo.git  
! [remote rejected] master -> master (non-fast forward)  
error: failed to push some refs to 'git@git.example.com:myrepo.git'

How do I get the remote repo to take the current state of the local repo?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    If forcing a push doesn’t help (git push --force origin or git push --force origin master should be enough), it might mean that the remote server is refusing non fast-forward pushes, via either receive.denyNonFastForwards config variable (see git config manpage for description), or via an update/pre-receive hook.

    With older Git you can work around that restriction by deleting git push origin :master (note the : before branch name) and then re-creating git push origin master given branch.

    If you can’t change this, then the only solution would be instead of rewriting history to create a commit reverting changes in D-E-F:

    A-B-C-D-E-F-[(D-E-F)^-1]   master

A-B-C-D-E-F                origin/master
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