How do I 'overwrite', rather than 'merge', a branch on another branch in Git?

Question

I have two branches, email and staging. staging is the latest one and I no longer need the old changes in email branch, y

Answer 1

What you want is this (actually the exact inverse of the currently accepted answer):

git checkout email
git merge --strategy-option=theirs staging  

What this does is:

• email branch files will now be exactly the same as staging branch
• email branch's history will be maintained
• staging branch's history will be added to email history

---

As added value, if you don't want all of staging branch's history, you can use squash to summarize it into a single commit message.

git checkout email
git merge --squash --strategy-option=theirs staging  
git commit -m "Single commit message for squash branch's history here'

So in summary, what this second version does is:

• email branch files will now be exactly the same as staging branch
• email branch's history will be maintained
• A single commit will be added on top of email branch's history. This commit will represent ALL the changes that took place in the staging branch