What's the best way to force a merge in git?

Question

I have a project with a dev branch and a production branch. Recently I've been working on a big new set of features in dev, so I haven't merged into production for about two weeks. In the meantime, though, there were some bugs that needed to be fixed in production.

For the most part I was able to make the fixes in dev and cherry-pick them into production. Sometimes, however, I would need to fix production by hand, as the fixes were substantially different in the two branches. Point is, the two branches have diverged a fair bit since they split.

Now I want to just push all of dev into production. I don't care about keeping any of the commits in production since the split, I just want production to look exactly like dev. [EDIT: I want production to look exactly like dev since the split, but don't want to rewrite history before the split] However, when I try to merge I get dozens of conflicts that I'd prefer not to fix by hand.

What's the best way to force a merge in git? Can I revert my production changes back to the split and then just fast-forward to the dev branch?

Answer 1

You can just push your dev branch onto the master repo production branch:

git push --force upstream-remote dev:production 

upstream-remote may just be origin if you're on a default clone.

Updated for mod'ed question:

You probably don't want to revert in the git sense but, yes, that's more or less what you want to do. Something like

git checkout -b merge <split hash> git merge dev git push --force origin merge:production 

<split hash> was the last commit on production that you want to keep.