Force “git push” to overwrite remote files

Question

I want to push my local files, and have them on a remote repo, without having to deal with merge conflicts. I just want my local version to have priority over the remote one

Answer 1

git push -f is a bit destructive because it resets any remote changes that had been made by anyone else on the team. A safer option is {git push --force-with-lease}.

What {--force-with-lease} does is refuse to update a branch unless it is the state that we expect; i.e. nobody has updated the branch upstream. In practice this works by checking that the upstream ref is what we expect, because refs are hashes, and implicitly encode the chain of parents into their value. You can tell {--force-with-lease} exactly what to check for, but by default will check the current remote ref. What this means in practice is that when Alice updates her branch and pushes it up to the remote repository, the ref pointing head of the branch will be updated. Now, unless Bob does a pull from the remote, his local reference to the remote will be out of date. When he goes to push using {--force-with-lease}, git will check the local ref against the new remote and refuse to force the push. {--force-with-lease} effectively only allows you to force-push if no-one else has pushed changes up to the remote in the interim. It's {--force} with the seatbelt on.