Summary

• The purpose of this article is to address certain situations where your local repository has a messed-up commit history (ie duplicated commits, divergent history) yet the remote repository is intact with no issues

• The outlined process will help you either start again from scratch or, if that's not possible, identify the list of local branches, remove them, and then sync them with their respective remote branches. This involves fetching the latest copy from the remote and resetting the local head to the latest remote head.

Environment

• Bitbucket Cloud repository

Diagnosis

• Execute the git log command on your local repository within branches and compare this to the commit history within your remote repository, if you notice that these don't match - this is a good indicator that your local repository history will need to be repaired before you may continue working

• Similarly, if you are having issues pushing to your remote repository, but no issues pulling from your remote - this is another indicator that there is a problem with your local commit history

Cause

• Typically, rewriting repository history through force pushing or rebasing has the potential to cause issues with a repository commit history if this is not performed properly - it is always recommended to backup your repository locally before attempting such operations

Solution

There are two ways to address this problem, the first is simple however may not be suitable for all users - particularly when there are unpushed changes that would be removed when the deletion is performed.

Solution 1: Delete Local and Clone Remote

• You can repair your local repository commit history by simply deleting your local repository, then performing a git clone from the remote repository
• This will give you a fresh copy of the remote repository and will allow you to continue working

Solution 2: Delete Local and Repair From Remote

• You will need to first identify your local branches, remove these local branches - then sync your local branches with their respective remote branches by fetching the latest copy from the remote and resetting the local head to the latest remote commit
• You will need to perform the following steps in a GIT terminal on each local branch to delete these local branches, sync these with the remote branches, and then reset the local head to the current remote commit

1. Perform git branch command to get a list of your local branches in your local repository and copy this list somewhere, you will need to run the commands below for each branch on that list
   
   

2. Now that you have a list of the branches, you can begin fixing their commit history (commands are case sensitive):

   git checkout some_other_branch
   
   git branch -D branch1
   
   git checkout -b branch1 origin/branch1
   
   git pull origin branch1
   
   git reset --hard origin/branch1

3. Verify that the local commit history matches your remote commit history before proceeding:

   git log -5

4. Repeat the above steps for all of the local branches and then try to push to the repo once you have finished all of these, you should see the following output which means that the local and remote branches are synced properly:

   git push --force
   
   > Everything up-to-date