JIYIK CN >

This article will discuss how to force the git pull command to overwrite our local files. This operation comes in handy when several people are working on the same file and we want to update our files according to the remote repository.

Let’s get straight to the point.

Force Git Pull to overwrite local files

Matching our local repository with the remote repository starts with fetching.

Get branch

We use the git fetch command to get commits, files, and references from our remote repository. Note that this command only downloads files, commits, and references to our local repository and does not merge anything.

You can fetch from a remote repository in the following context.

git fetch --all

The above command fetches from all branches in our remote repository.

reset changes

The next step is to reset our local repository to match ours origin/master. We will use the git reset command with the --hard flag to remove the unpublished commits and our local changes.

Our local repository will match the remote repository ( origin/master ).

$ git reset --hard origin/<branch-name>

In some cases, we may want to keep local changes. How can we do that?

Keep current local changes

We can maintain our current local commits and changes by creating a new branch before resetting our local repository.

git checkout <branch-name>
git branch <create-branch-to-save-current-changes>

The above command will create a new branch where we will save all the current changes in our local repository. We can now fetch the data and reset.

git fetch --all
git reset --hard origin/<branch-name>

Our old commits will be in <create-branch-to-save-current-changes>the branch.

Uncommitted changes

git resetThe command will remove all uncommitted changes in our local repository. We can save them and apply the commit later.

Follow these steps:

Git Pull

git pullThe command fetches the changes from our remote repository and merges them into our local repository. It combines the git fetchand git mergecommands.

We can override our local repository in the following context using command.

$ git rest --hard
$ git pull

We use the git clean command to remove all untracked files from our remote repository.

• The git clean -f command will remove untracked files.
• The git clean -df command will remove untracked files and folders.
• The git clean -xdf command will remove untracked or ignored files and directories.