Question

My master GIT branch seams to have some errors thus I’d like to recheck, re-merge or possibly clone my dev branch over the master branch so the master branch would be a copy of dev.

How can I do that?
Thx.

Answer 1

If the problem is simply that your checked-out files don’t match up with the branch, just use git reset normally:

git reset --hard HEAD

That should be all you need. However, if you still want to overwrite master with dev, read on.

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If you want to overwrite your master branch with the contents of your dev branch, use git reset like so:

$ git checkout master
$ git reset --hard dev

And then if you want to push this somewhere else:

$ git push origin master

Note that if your dev branch doesn’t fast-forward from your master branch (which I’m guessing it won’t, since you said that your master branch has some screwed up stuff in it), you’ll need to add the --force flag to the push to overwrite it on a remote:

$ git push origin master --force

Note, however, that this can involve all of the normal caveats of rewriting history a la git rebase – if anyone else uses this remote, they’ll need to deal with the equivalent of an upstream rebase.

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To avoid this problem in the future, advise your friend that using --force is almost never necessary. If they’re getting conflicts when they try to git push, they should git pull first, resolve the conflicts, and then git push.