Git Extreme Actions

I get asked a lot of git questions. Here's where I keep the more extreme answers

(Note: We use main in place of master, as this is the github default as of October 1, 2020.)

Nuke it From Orbit

Okay, I now know my main branch was supposed to be used only to track the upstream project. How do I reset it to be in sync with upstream?

Here we assume you already have configured your upstream remote correctly.

git remote update
# the double hyphen ensures that upstream/main is
# considered as a revision and not confused as a path
git reset --hard upstream/main --

Then push this new branch-head to your origin repository, ignoring the fact that it won't be a fast-forward:

git push origin +main

ref: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8134960/how-to-revert-master-branch-to-upstream

If something really screwy is going on, you can try (effectively) blowing away main and resetting it to origin/main

git checkout -B main origin/main

ref: https://superuser.com/questions/273172/how-do-i-reset-master-to-origin-master/273199