Git - replace local branch with remote branch

Question

I know this question has been asked but I can't seem to completely replace my local branch with my remote branch. I had installed a 3rd party plugin in my local branch and am having trouble removing the installation; thus, I want to "start over" with the remote version of the branch. The branch is called "dev" locally and "origin/dev" remotely. I've tried three ways of replacing my local branch with the remote version:

1. git reset HEAD --hard

2. git reset --hard origin/dev

3. git checkout dev
   git fetch
   git reset --hard origin/dev

But reviewing the local code after the executing the above git commands, I can still see leftover files and folders from the plugin.

Using git status, I get "Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/dev'. Nothing to commit, working directory clean".

Using git status --ignored, I get too many files to list... basically everything in my .gitignore file I believe.

I only want the code that exists in the remote dev branch and nothing else.

Can somebody help?

Update:

Turns out that the error that I was getting was due to a bunch of files in the directory, root/var/cache/*. My .gitignore file contains the following entries:

/var/*
!/var/package
var/session/*

Trying the possible ways to restore the local dev branch from remote (listed in the question above as well as the proposed solutions below), the root/var/cache directory remained present; I had to manually delete it before my application started functioning again. Looking at the github, the remote dev branch did not contain 'root/var/cache. Can anybody tell me whyroot/var/cache` was not responding to the git commands for replacing the local branch with the remote version?

Answer 1

From another branch (say master), reset your dev branch:

git branch -f dev origin/dev

Then, checkout dev and clean up your extra files:

git checkout dev
git clean -d -f

Answer 2

Try git clean -fx. That will remove all untracked files, even if they're mentioned in .gitignore.