How to replace local branch with remote branch entirely in Git?

Question

I have two branches:

1. local branch (the one which I work with)
2. remote branch (public, only well-tested commits go there)

Recently I seriously messed up my local branch.

How would I replace the local branch entirely with the remote one, so I can continue my work from where the remote branch is now?

I have already searched SO and checking out to the remote branch locally does not have any effect.

Answer 1

1. Make sure you've checked out the branch you're replacing (from Zoltán's comment).

2. Assuming that master is the local branch you're replacing, and that "origin/master" is the remote branch you want to reset to:

   git reset --hard origin/master 

This updates your local HEAD branch to be the same revision as origin/master, and --hard will sync this change into the index and workspace as well.

Answer 2

That's as easy as three steps:

1. Delete your local branch: git branch -d local_branch

2. Fetch the latest remote branch: git fetch origin remote_branch

3. Rebuild the local branch based on the remote one:

   git checkout -b local_branch origin/remote_branch