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This article discusses resetting the develop branch to make it the same as the master branch. It assumes that you have cloned a Git repository and created a develop branch off of the master branch.

After a while of banging around with your code, you realize your branch is a mess and want to reset it back to match the master branch. What do you think of this?

Make the develop branch identical to the master branch

There are two ways we can reset our development branch to master . The simplest and cleanest is to recreate the pointer.

To recreate the pointer to the develop branch, switch to the master branch and run the following command.

$ git branch -f development master

This will reset the commit history of the develop branch to match the commit history of the master branch.

Another way is to use git reset command. First, switch to the development branch and run the command below.

$ git reset --hard master

This command git branch -fhas the same effect as the command. However, both commands eliminate changes in the development branch that do not exist in the master branch.

If you don't want to eliminate these changes, you can create a commit that reflects the current state of the master branch. To do this, follow these steps:

First, switch to the development branch using the git checkout development command. Merge the master branch into the develop branch without creating a commit, as shown below.

$ git merge master --no-commit

This command will merge the changes but stop merging before committing the parts. Using the command below, you can check out the changes of the master branch from the index.

$ git checkout --theirs master .

Don’t forget to include the . at the end of the command. All that’s left is to commit the changes.

$ git commit -m"Resetting development to master"

This will preserve changes that are not present in the master branch and mirror the current state of the master branch.

git reset --hardIn short, you can reset any branch to master by recreating the pointer or with the help of command. Both of these ways will eliminate the changes that are not present in the master branch.

If you want to keep these changes, use the last method we discussed.