At some point every developer has used --force and overwritten somebody else’s work unnecessarily. It’s usually not the end of the world but its easily avoidable.

IMO you should never really use --force, in virtually 99.9% of cases where you need to force push you should be using --force-with-lease.

force vs with-lease

--force: Overwrites changes to your remote with the changes from your local irrespective of what changes exist on the remote branch.

--force-with-lease: Overwrites changes to your remote with changes from your local only if there have been no new commits to the remote branch (for example from a coworker or CI/CD bot).

ALIAS’!

If you haven’t been introduced to git alias’ then its time.

git config --global alias.pushf "push --force-with-lease"

source

The above alias will not only make your force pushes safer but also save you keystrokes.

Conclusion

It’s clear that --force-with lease is the better option when your working on a branch with other people but even if your the only person pushing changes to a branch you may still want to use --force-with lease. I have worked at multiple companies where there would be an automated process for generating a change log or generating translations and they would be committed against the PRs before getting merged, on multiple occasions folks would unintentionally force push and erase those commits.

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