Question

I’ve been getting up to speed with Git (very pleased with it so far) but I’m still a little confused about a couple of things. I’m using SourceTree on a Mac.

In particular, my team and I had been making changes, committing them and then pushing to our remote bare repo living on my linux server. Separately, I had been doing some experiments on my laptop and ended up with some divergent local changes.

Rather than trying to merge them, I decided that I really wanted to just revert my laptop back to the state of the remote repo. I had tried pulling down changes from the remote repo and after being warned that I would need to merge, I decided to revert (“reset”, I guess, in GIT language) to the last offical commit. I did this for everything and was then able to pull down the files.

However, SourceTree told me that there were 24 changes that I had to push back to the remote server but I couldn’t see what those changes were (particularly since my goal was to not have anything I did be saved). That made me very nervous.

Ultimately, I just blew away the entire folder (including the .git) and just cloned the remote respository again.

The downside of that last is that if you have any untracked new files, they will just get deleted if you don’t remember to copy them somewhere else temporarily.

My question is whether there is any way to just revert my local working copy (and the .git contents) to whatever is the latest state of the remote repo, leaving any untracked files in the working copy untouched?

I did find Why do I have to push the changes I just pulled from origin in Git? but it doesn’t really answer either of the issues I describe here.

Thanks in advance for any insights.

D

Answer 1

I believe what you are looking for is git reset --hard origin/master, assuming that origin is your remote and master is your branch.

Warning: this will blow away any modified files you have, but it should not affect untracked files.