JIYIK CN >

Git is the most popular and demanded version control system today. The user interface of Git is similar to other version control systems. We can log in, clone the repository and make commits.

However, Git has some significant differences that make it more complex than other systems.

Git is distributed. Instead of all repositories being stored in one central location, each user has their own repository. Everyone has to connect to another repository to use it. This is a bit annoying, but it also means that we can work on the same files in different locations. We can work on the same project in multiple places and the changes are synchronized.

Here we understand how to force pull all the changes in the current working local branch. In fact, we may happen to have an old git repository which is not synchronized with the remote repository with the latest changes. We may or may not have the latest commit in the remote. Now we want to pull all the latest remote changes. We don't even care about the local changes in the current repository. So what should we do for this situation? The solution to this problem is as follows.

Force pull in Git

By pullthe name of the command, we might think that we can use the pull command here git pull, but this is not the ideal way to use the pull command in Git. So, there are two ways to handle this situation, one is to delete the current local repository and clone the same repository again, but the disadvantage is that we lose the untracked files that already exist in the current repository.

First, we will execute fetch --allas shown below.

git fetch --all

The command here git fetchwill download the latest from the remote without merging or rebasing anything. Then, after executing the fetch as above, if we are on masterthe branch, we will execute the following command to reset:

git reset --hard origin/master

By executing the above command git reset, it will reset the master branch to what we have just fetched or if we were on any other branch, we would use the branch name as follows.

git reset --hard origin/<branch_name>

The above --hardoption will change all files in our working tree to match origin/masterthe files in the branch.

Keep local commits when pulling into Git

If we want to keep our local commits, we must resetcreate a local branch from the branch we are on before executing the command.

git checkout master
git branch new-backup-branch
git fetch --all
git reset --hard origin/master

The commands mentioned above are meant only for expert users who know what they are doing. A warning is in order for the above commands: Use the above commands only with caution and make sure you know what their operations mean before applying them!

Keep local changes when pulling into Git

When we execute resetthe command, both uncommitted and staged changes will be lost. So what is the solution to keep these changes in the local repository?

If we want to keep these changes, we will use the command before executing the reset command stash, and after executing , we can stash the changes pullover top of them . To do this, we will run the following command:pop

git stash

And after we have done the reset and pull, if we want to reapply these stashed changes, this way, we will get our local changes in our working directory again. We will use the following command to get our changes back:

git stash pop