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Mehdiway
Mehdiway

Reputation: 10646

Git - Make local HEAD the new master

I decided to go back a few commits because the path I followed was wrong. So I checked out Added cordova to .gitignore commit, and made some modifications. Like illustrated below :

enter image description here

Now when I push the new modifications, an error message shows up :
error: src refspec (detached from aad6423) does not match any.

How can I tell git to discard the previous commits (in purple) and continue with my local HEAD as master ?

Upvotes: 17

Views: 20752

Answers (5)

pjz
pjz

Reputation: 43057

So, I would do this in a couple steps:

git checkout -b new_master

to get a nice ref to what you want the new master to be.

git checkout master ; git checkout -b old_master

to keep a ref to the old master in case you want to go back or something later ; you can always delete that branch later once you're sure.

git checkout master ; git reset --hard new_master

this will reset the HEAD of the branch you're on (master) to the specified reference (new_master).

git push -f origin

this will do a force-push of your new master branch to the remote. NOTE that this is bad practice if anyone else is using your remote repo as it will potentially break their fetches/pulls.

Upvotes: 3

Max
Max

Reputation: 22315

Even though you don't want that old branch anymore, git really doesn't like rewriting history or discarding changes. Just revert and merge.

git branch new_master              # name current detached HEAD
git checkout master                # switch back to master
git revert --no-edit HEAD~4..HEAD  # create commits reverting back to where the history split
git merge new_master               # merge
git branch -d new_master           # don't need it anymore

Upvotes: 22

Tavian Barnes
Tavian Barnes

Reputation: 12922

Make HEAD your new local master:

$ git checkout -B master

Force-push your changes:

$ git push -f

Upvotes: 29

dan
dan

Reputation: 13262

Since you pushed the changes upstream, the better approach is to revert them with another commit. A commit that will undo the changes. Removing commits or branches from upstream is bad practice. See this answer for more details.

Upvotes: 0

isherwood
isherwood

Reputation: 61056

Because you have divergence, you'll need to destroy the remote master and push up the local version. Depending on the security in place, you may not be able to do so. This has other implications as well, depending on who else is doing work based on master. It should be done with extreme caution.

git push origin :master // deletes remote master
git push origin master  // pushes local master to remote

Another (probably better) approach would be to revert the commits to master and commit the reverts (which themselves are commits). Then cherry-pick the work you've done on your local. First, create a new topic branch locally to save your work.

git checkout -b <topic_branch_name>  // create new branch to save local work
git checkout master
git reset --hard HEAD // sync local master to remote HEAD

git revert <last commit to master>
git revert <second-to-last commit to master>
...
git revert <Added cordova to .gitignore commit>
git push

git cherry-pick <commit hash from topic branch commit(s)>

Upvotes: 1

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