How to make my branch be identical to its correspondent remote branch ?

Question

This post follows my previous post about git pull: Git: What does EXACTLY "git pull" do?

Let's say that I want to do "git pull" to a certain branch and I want that my local copy of this branch will be IDENTICAL to the remote copy of the remote one. How to do it?

Answer 1

Assuming you're already on the branch in question (and it's tracking the upstream correctly), the simplest way is

git fetch && git reset --hard FETCH_HEAD

This uses the special FETCH_HEAD ref so you don't need to type the upstream branch name or anything else.

Answer 2

This should do the trick:

git fetch
git reset --hard origin/{insert branch name}
git clean -fd

If you want it to really be the same including removing the gitignored stuff, use git clean -fdx.