Force my local master to be origin/master

Question

I've let master and origin/master get stuck in the sidelines, and am no longer interested in the changes on that branch.

I followed these instructions to get my local master pointing to the right place Make the current git branch a master branch

 git checkout better_branch
 git merge --strategy=ours master    # keep the content of this branch, but record a merge
 git checkout master
 git merge better_branch             # fast-forward master up to the merge

which worked fine except git status gives

C:\data\localprojects\Beko2011Azure [master]> git status

# On branch master
# Your branch and 'origin/master' have diverged,
# and have 395 and 2 different commits each, respectively.
#
nothing to commit, working directory clean

so how do I now persuade origin/master (github) to reflect my master. Anything orphaned on origin/master can be safely abandoned.

Answer 1

To have origin/master the same as master:

git push -f origin master:master

Discussion on the parameters:

• -f is the force flag. Normally, some checks are being applied before it's allowed to push to a branch. The -f flag turns off all checks.

• origin is the name of the remote where to push (you could have several remotes in one repo)

• master:master means: push my local branch master to the remote branch master. The general form is localbranch:remotebranch. Knowing this is especially handy when you want to delete a branch on the remote: in that case, you push an empty local branch to the remote, thus deleting it: git push origin :remote_branch_to_be_deleted

A more elaborate description of the parameters could be found with man git-push

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Opposite direction: If you want to throw away all your changes on master and want to have it exactly the same as origin/master:

git checkout master
git reset --hard origin/master