How do I 'overwrite', rather than 'merge', a branch on another branch in Git?

Question

I have two branches, email and staging. staging is the latest one and I no longer need the old changes in email branch, y

Answer 1

I've seen several answers and that's the only procedure that let me fix that without any conflicts.

If you want all changes from branch_new in branch_old, then:

git checkout branch_new
git merge -s ours branch_old
git checkout branch_old
git merge branch_new

once applied those four commands you can push the branch_old without any problem

Answer 2

How about:

git branch -D email
git checkout staging
git checkout -b email
git push origin email --force-with-lease

Answer 3

If you're like me and you don't want to deal with merging, you can do the above steps, except use force instead of merge, because it will create a distracting log paper trail:

git checkout email
git reset --hard staging
git push origin email --force

Note: This is only if you REALLY never want to see the stuff in email again.

Answer 4

If you just want the two branches 'email' and 'staging' to be the same, you can tag the 'email' branch, then reset the 'email' branch to the 'staging' one:

$ git checkout email
$ git tag old-email-branch
$ git reset --hard staging

You can also rebase the 'staging' branch on the 'email' branch. But the result will contains the modification of the two branches.

Answer 5

I tried @knittl's write-tree/commit-tree approach.

branch-a: the kept branch

branch-b: the abandoned branch

// goto branch-a branch
$ git checkout branch-a

$ git write-tree
6fa6989240d2fc6490f8215682a20c63dac5560a // echo tree id? I guess

$ git commit-tree  -p branch-a -p branch-b 6fa6989240d2fc6490f8215682a20c63dac5560a
<type some commit message end with Ctrl-d>
20bc36a2b0f2537ed11328d1aedd9c3cff2e87e9 // echo new commit id

$ git reset --hard 20bc36a2b0f2537ed11328d1aedd9c3cff2e87e9

Answer 6

The easiest way to do it:

//the branch you want to overwrite
git checkout email 

//reset to the new branch
git reset --hard origin/staging

// push to remote
git push -f

Now the email branch and the staging are the same.