Question

I was working on a local branch and I needed to pull down one of the branches from origin so I issued the following command:

git pull origin design

When I did that, that branch ended up being merged into my current local branch which is not what I wanted at all. So I need to do 2 things:

1. How do I revert this merge back out of my local branch?
2. How do I pull a branch from origin without it doing this merge?

Answer 1

To back out a merge commit created by the pull:

git reset --hard HEAD^

If the merge was a fast-forward merge (meaning you hadn’t done any work locally), then git reset --hard to the sha1 of the last commit you want to keep locally.

To fetch a remote branch without merging:

git fetch origin

The remote branch will appear as something like origin/master (with git branch -a).