Recover from a git push --force

I was collaborating with a teammate on the same feature branch and wanted to git rebase update the branch with develop.

// Trying to rebase update our branch with develop

$ git checkout develop
$ git pull

$ git checkout feature/our-collab-branch
$ git rebase develop
$ git push --force

I then realized that there were changes I hadn't pulled from origin feature/our-collab-branch, and I had accidentally overwritten my teammate's commits with the git push --force.

Yipes!

Recovering from an accidental git push --force

Fortunately git doesn't discard commits even with a git push --force. Since we still had the original branch in our remote, none of the commits are actually lost.

We can use git reflog show to show the reference logs (hence, "reflog"), which is a record of the recent actions when the tips of the branches were updated.

After we get the SHA-1 checksum of the commit before our git push --force, we can recreate the branch and push the branch back to the remote.

// Show the reference logs
$ git reflog show remotes/origin/feature/our-collab-branch

971cf78 (HEAD -> feature/our-collab-branch, origin/feature/our-collab-branch) remotes/origin/feature/our-collab-branch@{0}: update by push
7138c46 remotes/origin/feature/our-collab-branch@{1}: update by push

// Recreate the feature/our-collab-branch branch
$ git checkout 7138c46
$ git branch -D feature/our-collab-branch

$ checkout -b feature/our-collab-branch
$ git push origin HEAD --force

Whew! Now we've restored the branch to the state before my git push --force