Question

How do I force “git pull” to overwrite local files?

How do I force an overwrite of local files on a git pull?

The scenario is the following:

A team member is modifying the templates for a website we are working on

They are adding some images to the images directory (but forgets to add them under source control)

They are sending the images by mail, later, to me

I'm adding the images under the source control and pushing them to GitHub together with other changes

They cannot pull updates from GitHub because Git doesn't want to overwrite their files.

This is the error I'm getting:

error: Untracked working tree file 'public/images/icon.gif' would be overwritten by merge

How do I force Git to overwrite them? The person is a designer - usually, I resolve all the conflicts by hand, so the server has the most recent version that they just need to update on their computer.

Answer 1

If you have any files that are not tracked by Git (e.g. uploaded user content), these files will not be affected.

First, run a fetch to update all origin/<branch> refs to latest:

git fetch --all

Backup your current branch:

git checkout -b backup-master

Then, you have two options:

git reset --hard origin/master

OR If you are on some other branch:

git reset --hard origin/<branch_name>

Explanation:

git fetch downloads the latest from remote without trying to merge or rebase anything.

Then the git reset resets the master branch to what you just fetched. The --hard option changes all the files in your working tree to match the files in origin/master