push --force-with-lease by default

I just learned about git push --force-with-lease. It's pretty awesome. But, of course, I don't use force that often, and so I'm worried that I might forget about this nifty feature the next time I need it.

Is there a way to configure git so git push -f will automatically use --force-with-lease unless I intentionally override it with --no-force-with-lease?

(I can't imagine ever wanting to use force without lease!)

AFAIK there is no configuration available to tell git to always use force-with-lease instead of force. This seems to be a good example for a feature request; if you have no problem to dive into the git code base you could implement it yourself and submit it for review.

EDIT As it stands, this is still true in February 2021.

Until then the only option I see is, as so often, to create an alias which serves this purpose.

Create an alias

To create an alias one would use git config --global alias.<alias-name> <command>, in our case I would suggest something similar to this.

git config --global alias.pushfwl "push --force-with-lease"

This will create an entry in your global .gitconfig file (which you can usually find in your home directory). After this you can simply use git pushfwl to force-with-lease.

Get your hands dirty

If you want to implement the feature yourself but aren't sure where to start, you should at first take a look at the documentation directory in the git repository. Here you can find the coding guidelines and information on how to submit patches.

You can find all these links and more on the official community page.

My solution was to create a wrapper script, and use an alias so that I always use it in place of the real git.

Whenever I try to git push -f, I see the following:

⚡ git push -f
use this instead so you don't cause race conditions in the 
repo: git push --force-with-lease

Some advantages of this script are:

• it trains me to habitually use --force-with-lease, so i don't get nagged when i get it wrong
• if, for some reason, we really do need to force push, git push --force will work.

How to implement it:

1. create a custom script that will pass through any params to git, except for -f
2. alias that script so we use it instead of git

These instructions assume Linux or Mac, running bash. I haven't tried this with zsh or Windows, but I assume it'll work there too.

~/.bash_profile:

alias git=~/.git_wrapper.sh

~./git_wrapper.sh:

#!/bin/bash
for arg in "$@"; do
    if [ "$arg" = "push" ]; then
        ispush=1
    elif [ "$ispush" = 1 -a "$arg" = '-f' ]; then
        echo "use this instead so you don't cause race conflicts in the repo: git push --force-with-lease"
        exit 1
    fi
done

git "$@"

With those changes, restart your terminal and git should now get uppity when you try to force push.

I'm worried that I might forget about this nifty feature the next time I need it.

Git 2.13 (Q2 2017) explains why there is no "protection" against this push option being forgotten, because even if you do not forget it at the git push level, it might still be ignored.

See commit f17d642 (19 Apr 2017) by Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason (avar).
^{(Merged by Junio C Hamano -- gitster -- in commit 46bdfa3, 26 Apr 2017)}

push: document & test --force-with-lease with multiple remotes

Document & test for cases where there are two remotes pointing to the same URL, and a background fetch & subsequent git push --force-with-lease shouldn't clobber un-updated references we haven't fetched.

Some editors like Microsoft's VSC have a feature to auto-fetch in the background, this bypasses the protections offered by --force-with-lease & --force-with-lease=<refname>, as noted in the documentation being added here.

So the documentation for git push now includes:

general note on safety: supplying this option without an expected value, i.e. as --force-with-lease or --force-with-lease=<refname> interacts very badly with anything that implicitly runs git fetch on the remote to be pushed to in the background, e.g. git fetch origin on your repository in a cronjob.

The protection it offers over --force is ensuring that subsequent changes your work wasn't based on aren't clobbered, but this is trivially defeated if some background process is updating refs in the background. We don't have anything except the remote tracking info to go by as a heuristic for refs you're expected to have seen & are willing to clobber.

If your editor or some other system is running git fetch in the background for you a way to mitigate this is to simply set up another remote:

git remote add origin-push $(git config remote.origin.url)
git fetch origin-push

Now when the background process runs git fetch origin the references on origin-push won't be updated, and thus commands like:

git push --force-with-lease origin-push

Will fail unless you manually run git fetch origin-push.
This method is of course entirely defeated by something that runs git fetch --all, in that case you'd need to either disable it or do something more tedious like:

git fetch              # update 'master' from remote
git tag base master    # mark our base point
git rebase -i master   # rewrite some commits
git push --force-with-lease=master:base master:master

I.e. create a base tag for versions of the upstream code that you've seen and are willing to overwrite, then rewrite history, and finally force push changes to master if the remote version is still at base, regardless of what your local remotes/origin/master has been updated to in the background.