Git, How to reset origin/master to a commit?

Question

origin/xxx branches are always pointer to a remote. You cannot check them out as they're not pointer to your local repository (you only checkout the commit. That's why you won't see the name written in the command line interface branch marker, only the commit hash).

What you need to do to update the remote is to force push your local changes to master:

git checkout master
git reset --hard e3f1e37
git push --force origin master
# Then to prove it (it won't print any diff)
git diff master..origin/master

The solution found here helped us to update master to a previous commit that had already been pushed:

git checkout master
git reset --hard e3f1e37
git push --force origin e3f1e37:master

The key difference from the accepted answer is the commit hash "e3f1e37:" before master in the push command.

Assuming that your branch is called master both here and remotely, and that your remote is called origin you could do:

git reset --hard <commit-hash>
git push -f origin master

However, you should avoid doing this if anyone else is working with your remote repository and has pulled your changes. In that case, it would be better to revert the commits that you don't want, then push as normal.

Since I had a similar situation, I thought I'd share my situation and how these answers helped me (thanks everyone).

So I decided to work locally by amending my last commit every time I wanted to save my progress on the main branch (I know, I should've branched out, committed on that, kept pushing and later merge back to master).

One late night, in paranoid fear of loosing my progress to hardware failure or something out of the ether, I decided to push master to origin. Later I kept amending my local master branch and when I decided it's time to push again, I was faced with different master branches and found out I can't amend origin/upstream (duh!) like I can local development branches.

So I didn't checkout master locally because I already was after a commit. Master was unchanged. I didn't even need to reset --hard, my current commit was OK.

I just forced push to origin, without even specifying what commit I wanted to force on master since in this case it's whatever HEAD is at. Checked git diff master..origin/master so there weren't any differences and that's it. All fixed. Thanks! (I know, I'm a git newbie, please forgive!).

So if you're already OK with your master branch locally, just:

git push --force origin master
git diff master..origin/master