Sometimes for whatever reason you screw up and get your local master branch into a nasty inconsistent state. Maybe it was an accidental merge or accidental commits but you just want to start over. Here is how to replace your local master branch with a fresh copy from upstream.

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you cannot delete the branch you are on, so move to something else.

git checkout

delete local master (if not fully merged do ‘-D’. In this case I did have to use capital D)

git branch -d master

get changes from upstream master

git fetch upstream master

make a fresh master branch

git checkout -b master upstream/master

force push to origin, it will blow away your old master

git push origin master -f
{% endhighlight %}

There are easier ways to do this, but conceptually this is, in my opinion, easy to follow and it cleans up your remote as well (if you accidentally pushed a dirty branch).