How do I force "git pull" to overwrite local files?

Like Hedgehog I think the answers are terrible. But though Hedgehog's answer might be better, I don't think it is as elegant as it could be. The way I found to do this is by using fetch and merge with a defined strategy. Which should make it so that your local changes are preserved as long as they are not one of the files that you are trying to force an overwrite with.

First do a commit of your changes

 git add *
 git commit -a -m "local file server commit message"

Then fetch the changes and overwrite if there is a conflict

 git fetch origin master
 git merge -s recursive -X theirs origin/master

-X is an option name, and theirs is the value for that option. You're choosing to use their changes (the other option is ours changes) if there is a conflict.

It looks like the best way is to first do:

git clean

To delete all untracked files and then continue with the usual git pull...

I had the same problem. No one gave me this solution, but it worked for me.

I solved it by:

1. Delete all the files. Leave just the .git directory.
2. git reset --hard HEAD
3. git pull
4. git push

Now it works.

Here is a generic solution if you do not always want to paste the branch name or you want to automate this within a script

git fetch
git reset --keep origin/$(git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD)

If you want to reset your local changes too:

git fetch
git reset --hard origin/$(git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD)

You also could add a bash alias using this command:

alias gplf='git fetch && echo "HEAD was at $(git rev-parse --short HEAD)" && git reset --hard origin/$(git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD)'

I had a similar problem. I had to do this:

git reset --hard HEAD
git clean -f
git pull

I am not sure why anyone did not talk about FETCH_HEAD yet.

git fetch origin master && git reset --hard FETCH_HEAD

If you want to put it in an alias, the command would be:

git config --global alias.fpull '!git fetch origin master && git reset --hard FETCH_HEAD'

Another way of solving this is to first stash any uncommitted changes using git stash and then run

git pull --rebase=interactive -s recursive -X theirs

In the interactive rebase you can change all your local undesired commits to drop, which will get rid of them and leave you at the head of the remote branch without introducing a merge commit.

Now you can run git stash apply if you had local stashed changed that you want to bring back.

If you are working on your code and find the new changes a huge mistake or unwanted you can simply use an alternative like:

git restore .

where . means all the files present in the directory.

1: Reset to a previous commit

git reset --hard HEAD

2: Delete Untracked Files

git clean -f

3: Pull the commits

git pull

Sources:

• https://git-scm.com/docs/git-reset
• https://git-scm.com/docs/git-clean/

"My local changes was small, or my changes doesn't work. I just want to reset everything back to original. I know that all my local changes will be lost."

If that's the case then:

git reset --hard
git pull

Despite the fact that this question has already many answers, the original question is to solve this question

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

As binary files can't be merged a simple answer is

git checkout public/images/icon.gif

With that the file will recover the previous state it had in this branch.

I usually do git stash if I don't want to lose my changes or something like git checkout . if I don't care about locally modified files. IMO much more simple than reset --hard, clean... and all this stuff more suited to leave the branch as in remote, including commits, untracked files, rather than just solving a locally modified file.

Once you do git pull, you will get list of files that are not matching. If the number of files is not very large then you can checkout those files, this action will overwrite those files.

git checkout -- <filename>

I usually do it if for quick check I modify local files on server (no recommended and probabaly reason behind you getting this issue :D ), I checkout the changed files after finding solution.

Step 1. (optional)
From the root of your local repository, save a backup and empty the current folder:

mkdir -p ../<branch>-bkp && mv --backup=t * ../<branch>-bkp

Step 2. Download all files and folders of the branch from the remote repository:

git checkout <branch> && git add -A . && git reset --hard origin/<branch> && git pull

where you should replace <branch> with the name of the branch you want to overwrite.

Comments:

• You may prefer to manually backup and remove the current files and folders instead of step 1.
  In fact, I recommend doing this with a file-handler in the GUI of your operating system.
• If you skip step 1, beware: you will lose all work in the local repository!
• Important: if you leave out git pull in step 2,
  you risk not getting the latest version from the remote repository!
  According to the second reference below, git reset --hard will
  reset the staging area and the working directory to match the most recent commit.
  My experience contradicts this claim!
• If you run git reset --hard origin/<branch_to_overwrite> without first deleting all files and folders from your local repository, beware that any junk files still laying around may sneak into the remote repository at a later git push even if that was not your intention.
  The extra git add -A . in step 2 prevents this from happening if you choose to leave out step 1.

References:
https://gitforwindows.org/
https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/undoing-changes/git-reset
https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/rewriting-history/git-reflog

I’ve tried most of what I could find here, none worked in my case.

What worked was git merge -X theirs

You could try git pull --force or maybe stash your commits by using git stash and then running git pull.