Git force push

Git - Force push

To ‘force push’ is exactly as it sounds, to forcefully push your changes onto a remote. Opinions are split on this feature, as it is considered highly hazardous.

On one hand, this is a useful feature to change the history to correct an error.

On the other hand, this doesn’t guarantee that everyone can accept those changes - particularly if they have branched or committed updated with the expectation that history does not change.

I fall into the latter camp; force-push is an evil that has no place in the vast majority of projects and should be outlawed. The edge case is when you actually do need to remove something from the history, usually large binaries or passwords. Having had the misfortune to have to do this, I know first hand how error-prone and difficult this is, and how easy it is for the removed history to reappear from a clone of the remote.

In order to force push, you use a git push command with an option to cause it to replace the data on the remote:

git push --force
# or
git push --force-with-lease

The first variant is a full-on overwrite of history on the remote. This is the darkest kind of evil.

The second variant –force-with-lease is a milder but still bastardly thing to do. It will overwrite history on the remote if the histories align. This only means that the remote you are using has no updates - it doesn’t mean that others working on the same code haven’t done changes but not yet pushed them. It’s entirely possible to have branches that can neither pull nor push as you’ve just changed the premise upon which they were built.

So please, I beg you, just use pull & merge, have a few extra commits in the log, and avoid all the stresses that are attached to this evil feature. There are ways to do it safely, but this is beyond most and just adds too much complexity what should be an otherwise simple development workflow. I for one don’t need the headaches that –force brings. Thankfully, this can be controlled by the administrators of some Git servers like Stash, GitHub Enterprise, and GitLab to block and force-push updates, and it is possible to use git hooks to manage this as well. There’s an example here that might be helpful - https://gist.github.com/pixelhandler/5718585