When to Use Force Checkout
- You have uncommitted changes that you want to discard.
- You are dealing with merge conflicts and need to favour specific changes.
- You need to reset a branch to a previous state, potentially overwriting existing changes.
Using force checkout ensures that your working directory matches the target state without any remnants of previous work that could cause conflicts or errors.
How to Force Checkout in Git?
Git is used for tracking changes in source code during software development. One of the important operations in Git is checkout, which allows developers to switch between different branches or revert files to a previous state.
Sometimes, you may need to force a checkout, especially when working with conflicting changes or when a clean state is required. This article will guide you through the process of forcing a checkout in Git, explaining the scenarios where it is needed and the steps involved.
Table of Content
- What is Git Checkout?
- When to Use Force Checkout
- Approach 1: Using git checkout -f
- Approach 2: Using git checkout –ours or git checkout –theirs
- Approach 3: Using git checkout -B