My coworker Calle (not in the picture) suggested in our guides that we
prefer the flag --force-with-lease over --force to the git push
command. This option allows one to force push without the risk of
unintentionally overwriting someone else’s work. It will update remote
references only if it has the same value as the remote-tracking branch we have
locally. In other words, only if nobody has updated the branch upstream. If
there are new remote commits, --force-with-lease will fail with a “stale info”
message, prompting us to fetch first.
--force-with-lease fits nicely into our workflow of rebasing and squashing
commits before merging into main, and we use it so often that we created an
alias in our gitconfig:
[alias]
pf = push --force-with-lease
I now always push with the pf alias, which always gets my work merged with
upstream. Unless it could set the house on fire.