this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2025
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this guy would have force pushed onto main about 10 mins after this if he did have git
And then lost the reflog by
rm -rfing the project and cloning it again.God bless DCVS.
Tbf you have to do that for the first push, if a Readme file was autogenerated
Does that still happen if you use the merge unrelated histories option? (Been a minute since I last had to use that option in git)
Never have heard of that, but in the case of you also having a Readme that will be even more complicated, I imagine. So just adding -f is the easier option.
You don't if you just clone the repo you created.
Huh? I'm talking about existing code being in a dir, then initting a git repo there, creating a pendant on your hoster of choice and then pushing it there. Wouldn't cloning the repo from step 3 to the code from step 1 overwrite the contents there?
There are multiple solutions to this without using --force.
Move the files, clone, unmove the files, commit, push being the most straightforward that I can summon at this time.. but I've solved this dozens of times and have never use --force.
If your remote is completely empty and has no commits, you can just push normally. If it has an auto-generated "initial commit" (pretty sure Github does something like that), you could force push, or merge your local branch into the remote branch and push normally. I think cloning the repo and copying the contents of your local repo into it is the worst option: you'll lose all local commits.
True, in the situation with a local history maybe it's worthwhile to --force to nuke an empty remote. In that case it is practical to do so. I just typically like to find non-force options.
You can also just tell GitHub to not do that.
Yeah, I was thinking of a new repo with no existing code.
In your case you'd want to uncheck the creation of a readme so the hosted repo is empty and can be pushed to without having to overwrite (force) anything.