Using “git push --force” is really evil. You force your current state of a local branch upon the remote branch, no matter what. Even if some commit got pushed right before your force push, it would be overwritten without any notice at all! Unfortunately with a rebasing strategy you can not avoid it.
Git rebase
In an ultimate attempt to keep the commit history of our main branch clean, all our feature teams rebase regularly to keep the history a single straight line. This has great advantages! There are no merge commits for every time upstream changes are incorporated. Merging can make it harder to understand the history of the project.
While rebasing and force pushes are very common, I wondered how integrators prevent losing commits that were pushed after the last fetch and force push?
It seemed that they simply didn’t. “Just be really, really fast…”, some people said jokingly.
Git push --force-with-lease
If something happens at the remote branch you are force pushing to, since you last fetched it, you may lose other people’s commits.
Developers who are unaware of the decision to rebase the branch, may attempt to push to the branch between the time you fetched to rebase it and the time you pushed to replace it with the result of the rebase action.
Fortunately git added the option to force push safely with --force-with-lease!
The “git push --force-with-lease” command pushes, based on the assumption that the state of the branch is still at the same state as currently known at the last fetch. If that is not the case, i.e. something happened to the branch since preparing for this push, then this push is not executed and fails.
$ git push --force-with-lease origin master
To ssh://git@github.com:jkeuper/jkeuper.github.io.git
! [rejected] master -> master (stale info)
error: failed to push some refs to 'ssh://git@github.com:jkeuper/jkeuper.github.io.git'
$
Wrap up
It seems that too many people are still using “git push --force”, possibly not even knowing that the --force-with-lease option exists. I think the --force option should be removed from git completely.
Please spread the word about --force-with-lease!