How to discard local commits in Git?
GitGit ResetGit Problem Overview
I'd been working on something, and decided it was completely screwed...after having committed some of it. So I tried the following sequence:
git reset --hard
git rebase origin
git fetch
git pull
git checkout
At which point I got the message
Your branch is ahead of 'origin/master' by 2 commits.
I want to discard my local commits, without having to wipe out my local directory and redownload everything. How can I accomplish that?
Git Solutions
Solution 1 - Git
git reset --hard origin/master
will remove all commits not in origin/master where origin is the repo name and master is the name of the branch.
Solution 2 - Git
As an aside, apart from the answer by mipadi (which should work by the way), you should know that doing:
git branch -D master
git checkout master
also does exactly what you want without having to redownload everything (your quote paraphrased). That is because your local repo contains a copy of the remote repo (and that copy is not the same as your local directory, it is not even the same as your checked out branch).
Wiping out a branch is perfectly safe and reconstructing that branch is very fast and involves no network traffic. Remember, git is primarily a local repo by design. Even remote branches have a copy on the local. There's only a bit of metadata that tells git that a specific local copy is actually a remote branch. In git, all files are on your hard disk all the time.
If you don't have any branches other than master, you should:
git checkout -b 'temp'
git branch -D master
git checkout master
git branch -D temp
Solution 3 - Git
What I do is I try to reset hard to HEAD. This will wipe out all the local commits:
git reset --hard HEAD^
Solution 4 - Git
You need to run
git fetch
To get all changes and then you will not receive message with "your branch is ahead".
Solution 5 - Git
I have seen instances where the remote became out of sync and needed to be updated. If a reset --hard or a branch -D fail to work, try
git pull origin
git reset --hard
Solution 6 - Git
I had to do a :
git checkout -b master
as git said that it doesn't exists, because it's been wipe with the
git -D master