Quick little tutorial here, mostly for my own personal reference, on how to restore your local working directory to match a remote master branch. Take this scenario for instance, you’re working on a project for work, maybe as a junior developer working on your first professional project, and you make a bunch of changes to your working directory that you want to throw away, and restore your project to match the remote master branch. Here are your four magic commands:

$ git checkout master

$ git fetch origin

$ git reset --hard origin/master

$ git clean -df

Similarly, if you want your local working directory running on your personal computer to match a different remote branch other than master, you can run something like:

$ git checkout users/myusername/myfeaturebranch

$ git fetch origin

$ git reset --hard origin/users/myusername/myfeaturebranch

$ git clean -df