Question

So I forked a project in github, and cannot push my local changes to my origin repo because of errors during the ‘push’ command requiring that I first do a ‘pull’. Well the problem is the ‘pull’ keeps overwriting all of my local commits.

Example shown below:

There is a project A (remote = upstream) on github that I forked into my own project (remote = origin). I then created a branch “branch_a” in which I added all my patch changes and pushed this branch to my remote origin repo. I ended up botching this whole process with multiple commits so I needed to squash my commits into one in order to submit a Pull Request to send my changes to project A. Attempts to squash my commits and synch with upstream repo went as follows:

git rebase -i upstream/master

I saw 4 commits and picked the one I wanted and removed the others

git push origin branch_a

Received error:

! [rejected] branch_a -> branch_a (non-fast-forward)
error: failed to push some refs to ‘https://github.com/#####/#####.git’
To prevent you from losing history, non-fast-forward updates were rejected
Merge the remote changes (e.g. ‘git pull’) before pushing again. See the
‘Note about fast-forwards’ section of ‘git push –help’ for details.

Ran the pull command:

git pull origin branch_a

Received message:

• branch branch_a -> FETCH_HEAD
  Merge made by recursive.
  libpex/INSTALL | 364 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
  1 files changed, 364 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
  create mode 100644 libpex/INSTALL

Local commit completely overridden by the pull command (I have tried to delete this file about 10 times but it keeps coming back).

So now I’m back to having 4 commits again and I cannot for the life of me push the correct commit back to my origin repo. What can I do about this?

Answer 1

If you want to tell Git to push what you have and overwrite whatever is at the destination (this can destroy history, so use it carefully) then supply --force to your push statement:

git push --force origin branch_a

This will cause the origin/branch_a branch to be updated to point at your local branch_a branch, regardless of whether or not it is a fast-forward. Any commits reachable from origin/branch_a that are not also reachable from your local branch_a branch or any other remote branch will be lost in the remote repository.