How to replace local branch with remote branch entirely in Git?

Solution 1:

1. Make sure you've checked out the branch you're replacing (from Zoltán's comment).

2. Assuming that master is the local branch you're replacing, and that "origin/master" is the remote branch you want to reset to:

   git reset --hard origin/master
   

This updates your local HEAD branch to be the same revision as origin/master, and --hard will sync this change into the index and workspace as well.

Solution 2:

That's as easy as three steps:

1. Delete your local branch: git branch -d local_branch

2. Fetch the latest remote branch: git fetch origin remote_branch

3. Rebuild the local branch based on the remote one:

   git checkout -b local_branch origin/remote_branch

Solution 3:

I'm kind of surprised no one mentioned this yet; I use it nearly every day:

git reset --hard @{u}

Basically, @{u} is just shorthand for the upstream branch that your current branch is tracking. For example, this typically equates to origin/[my-current-branch-name]. It's nice because it's branch agnostic.

Make sure to git fetch first to get the latest copy of the remote branch.

Solution 4:

git branch -D <branch-name>
git fetch <remote> <branch-name>
git checkout -b <branch-name> --track <remote>/<branch-name>