Question

I’d like to reclaim the dev branch, but it’s filled with things we don’t want to keep. Can I make it just stop being whatever it is now and be based of staging instead without deleting the history that’s in it? I’d like to set things up like this:

staging __________________________________
dev     _________  \______/    \____/

Answer 1

Depends on what you mean by “based off of staging” and “without deleting the history”.

If you mean that you want to act like you merged dev and staging together, but actually have the end result be exactly what is currently in staging, that’s easy. From the root directory of the repository:

git checkout origin/dev -b dev
git merge --no-commit origin/staging
git checkout --theirs .
git commit -m "Revert back to the contents of staging"
git push origin dev

The key line here is the third one. It’s what overwrites the result of the merge with the exact contents of the origin/staging branch.