Git Pull While Ignoring Local Changes?

Question

Is there a way to do a git pull that ignores any local file changes without blowing the directory away and having to perform a git clone?

Answer 1

This will fetch the current branch and attempt to do a fast forward to master:

git fetch && git merge --ff-only origin/master

Answer 2

For me the following worked:

(1) First fetch all changes:

$ git fetch --all

(2) Then reset the master:

$ git reset --hard origin/master

(3) Pull/update:

$ git pull

Answer 3

The command bellow wont work always. If you do just:

$ git checkout thebranch
Already on 'thebranch'
Your branch and 'origin/thebranch' have diverged,
and have 23 and 7 different commits each, respectively.

$ git reset --hard
HEAD is now at b05f611 Here the commit message bla, bla

$ git pull
Auto-merging thefile1.c
CONFLICT (content): Merge conflict in thefile1.c
Auto-merging README.md
CONFLICT (content): Merge conflict in README.md
Automatic merge failed; fix conflicts and then commit the result.

and so on...

To really start over, downloading thebranch and overwriting all your local changes, just do:

---

$ git checkout thebranch
$ git reset --hard origin/thebranch

---

This will work just fine.

$ git checkout thebranch
Already on 'thebranch'
Your branch and 'origin/thebranch' have diverged,
and have 23 and 7 different commits each, respectively.

$ git reset --hard origin/thebranch
HEAD is now at 7639058 Here commit message again...

$ git status
# On branch thebranch
nothing to commit (working directory clean)

$ git checkout thebranch
Already on 'thebranch'

Answer 4

You just want a command which gives exactly the same result as rm -rf local_repo && git clone remote_url, right? I also want this function. I wonder why git does not provide such a command (such as git reclone or git sync), neither does svn provide such a command (such as svn recheckout or svn sync).

Try the following command:

git reset --hard origin/master
git clean -fxd
git pull

Answer 5

If you are on Linux:

git fetch
for file in `git diff origin/master..HEAD --name-only`; do rm -f "$file"; done
git pull

The for loop will delete all tracked files which are changed in the local repo, so git pull will work without any problems.
The nicest thing about this is that only the tracked files will be overwritten by the files in the repo, all other files will be left untouched.

Answer 6

If you mean you want the pull to overwrite local changes, doing the merge as if the working tree were clean, well, clean the working tree:

git reset --hard
git pull

If there are untracked local files you could use git clean to remove them. Use git clean -f to remove untracked files, -df to remove untracked files and directories, and -xdf to remove untracked or ignored files or directories.

If on the other hand you want to keep the local modifications somehow, you'd use stash to hide them away before pulling, then reapply them afterwards:

git stash
git pull
git stash pop

I don't think it makes any sense to literally ignore the changes, though - half of pull is merge, and it needs to merge the committed versions of content with the versions it fetched.