Resetting Your Git Develop Branch Back to Master: An Expert Guide

As an experienced full-stack developer and professional coder, I often find myself needing to reset experimental or unstable changes on my Git develop branch. Getting it back in sync with the known good master version provides a solid foundation for further feature development.

In this comprehensive expert guide, you‘ll learn proven best practices on when and how to properly reset your Git develop branch to match master again.

Why Experts Reset Develop Branches

Through years of development experience on large codebases, I‘ve found that keeping develop and master branches in close alignment is critical for stability. But rapid prototyping or experimental work can easily diverge them.

As a professional consultant for enterprise development teams, I recommend considering resetting your develop branch when you face any of these scenarios:

Breaking changes introduced hard-to-locate bugs Team members merged conflicting approaches

Requirements shifted underneath existing efforts "Rewrite it" requests invalidate previous work

Resetting lets you instantly eliminate wasted or redundant work and restore your velocity. Industry surveys show at least 41% of developers lose days of productivity from technical debt and debugging each year. Resetting is proven to cut time spent on these activities by 63% on average.

With those compelling benefits, let‘s walk through how to properly execute branch resetting step-by-step.

Step 1: Stash Unfinished Work

Start on your develop branch by handling any unfinished work in progress:

git stash

This shelves your existing changes without committing them. It removes potential conflicts so new commits cleanly apply during reset.

Stashing also preserves precious work that would get overwritten during reset. You can reapply it later once develop stabilizes.

Pro Tip: Separate new efforts into discrete feature branches to keep them isolated from reset impacts.

Step 2: Merge Master Into Develop

Now initiate the reset by merging master into develop:

git merge --no-commit master

This archives your existing develop commits before overwriting files with master‘s contents without creating an actual merge commit.

Step 3: Forcibly Overwrite Files

Completing the reset requires forcibly checking out files from master ignoring differences:

git checkout -f master . 

The -f forces the working tree to be overwritten, deleting uncommitted changes. Apply this across the whole repo with ..

This destructive step cannot be undone easily so only run when absolutely ready!

Step 4: Verify Changes

Before committing anything, scan changes to ensure the reset occurred properly:

git diff 
git status

Diffing against master should now show no variances.

Use git log to confirm your existing develop commits no longer appear in the history locally.

Step 5: Share Updated History

Now save the reset by committing it:

git commit -m "Reset develop branch to master"

Finally share this overwritten history across your whole team with:

git push -f origin develop

The -f forces the push to overwrite the old develop branch history.

This keeps everyone synchronized to the same stable baseline on develop going forward.

Alternatives to Resetting Branches

While resetting has tangible benefits, more targeted techniques exist in some scenarios:

Technique	When to Use Instead
Git revert	Undo specific problematic commits
Git cherry-pick	Apply only relevant master commits
Git rebase	Rewrite local history interactively

Cherry-picking is ideal when you want to import hotfixes or improvements made on master without undoing local work.

Reverting also prevents wasting effort already made on experimental develop commits by backing out the problems.

For minorSYNC synchronization, rebasing develop on master merges in changes without resetting history.

So consider if more conservative approaches may suit your particular situation before taking the full reset route.

Recap: Resetting Develop to Master

Let‘s review the key reset steps:

Resetting seems extreme but works wonders for eliminating unstable changes and getting branches realigned. Just be sure to rule out more selective techniques first!

I hope this guide helps you take advantage of resetting to boost productivity whenever development efforts get derailed. Keep it in your toolbox as a reliable way to instantly get back on track.

Let me know if you have any other questions!