Git protip: gently force push
By Maxime Bréhin • Published on 23 January 2023
• 1 min
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Sometimes we must force the push to partially rewrite the remote history with our local one (e.g. after a local rebase). That subject is pretty controversial. Some people say we should never change the remote history, and as always with “always or never” stances, I believe they’re wrong…
That strife usually comes from a partial understanding of what the push
command can actually do. We can’t blame users for that: the command is poorly designed, with many option misnomers and dangerous defaults. Indeed, the easiest way is the most dangerous one: autocompletion starts with the infamous --force
. 🤦♂️
To add insult to injury, most IDEs and editors offer a single approach to forced pushes, based on that very --force
alone! 🤦♂️🤦♂️
This is a shame, considering there’s an alternate option that ensures we only override our project history if we fetched remote updates beforehand: --force-with-lease
.
Note however that, as another example of poor design, this variant alone isn’t safe enough: to also ensure that what we fetched was also applied to our local history, we must add yet another option: --force-if-includes
.
Knowing that, you should ban the single --force
option as your default, unless you indeed want to erase what’s on the remote branch, regardless of third-party work there.
Because git push --force-with-lease --force-if-includes
is hard to remember and to type, you likely want an alias. Here is mine:
git config --global alias.push-with-lease 'push --force-with-lease --force-if-includes'
More tips and tricks?
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