Error untracked working tree file gitignore would be overwritten by merge

Let’s say you have two Git repositories: one on GitHub, and one on your computer.
They contain identical (or very similar) files, and what you want to do is “synchronize” them (i.e. make them look exactly the same). Maybe all you need is to download a few missing files from GitHub to your computer, or simply push some changes from your machine to GitHub.

You have tried git pull, but you’re getting this error:

error: Untracked working tree file * would be overwritten by merge.
fatal: read-tree failed

You need the changes, but obviously you don’t want to overwrite or lose any files. Don’t worry, the fix is actually straightforward!

Why am I seeing this error?

The reason is probably because you didn’t clone the repository. In my case, I already had some local files, so instead of running git clone, here’s what I did:

git init
git remote add origin git@github.com:<username>/<reponame>.git

If you try to git pull origin <branch-name>, you might get the “untracked working tree” error.

How do I fix it?

If you have already tried pulling from the remote and it didn’t work, here’s the fix:

git branch --track <branch-name> origin/<branch-name>

For example, if your branch is named main:

git branch --track main origin/main

What this does is simply tell Git that these two branches, main and origin/main, are related to each other, and that it should keep track of the changes between them. Turns out it also fixes the error, since Git can now see that nothing would be overwritten.

Wait — that’s it?

Yes! After running the command above, git status will indeed reveal the differences between the two repositories: your untracked files (i.e. extra files that you only have on your PC) will still be there, and some other files may have been automatically staged for deletion: these are files that are present in the remote repo, but you don’t have locally.

At this point you’ll want to double-check that everything is the way it should be. You may also want to run:

To get a clean state. Don’t worry, this won’t delete anything at all, it will simply unstage any modification that was applied automatically by Git. You can stage back the changes you care about using git add . — once you are happy, you can finally make a commit and run:

Note there’s no need to specify the origin and the branch name anymore, since the two branches (the local and the remote) are now tracked.

Hopefully this article helped you fix your issue; either way, feel free to ask for help by leaving a comment below.

Happy hacking!

• Игнорируем изменения прав файлов (chmod)
• error: The following untracked working tree files would be overwritten by merge
• Локальный git ignore
• Удаляем тег на удаленном репозитории
• Слияние ветки в master
• Прячем правки (сохраняем на потом)
• Откатываем последний комит в remote
• Смотрим изменения перед пушем
• Создание и применение патча

Игнорируем изменения прав файлов (chmod)

git config core.fileMode false

Используем флаг —global чтобы настройка применялась для всех репозиториев(использует ~/.gitconfig вместо .git/config)

git config --global core.fileMode false

error: The following untracked working tree files would be overwritten by merge

git fetch --all
git reset --hard origin/master

Локальный git ignore

.gitignore для всех проектов:

git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitexcludes
nano ~/.gitexcludes

.gitignore для конкретного проекта:

nano .git/info/exclude

Удаляем тег на удаленном репозитории

Удаляем тег с remote:

git push --delete origin tagname

Удаляем тег локально:

git tag --delete tagname

Слияние ветки в master

git checkout master
git merge some-branch
git push

Прячем правки (сохраняем на потом)

git stash
git stash list
git checkout -b some-branch
git stash pop (git stash apply stash@{0})

Откатываем последний комит в remote

Ситуация

git add .
git commit -m "comment"
git push origin master

А надо было выполнить:

git push origin some-branch

Решение

Пушим изменения в правильную ветку:

git push origin some-branch

Потом на мастере получим изменения из удалённой репы:

git checkout master
git fetch --all
git rebase origin/master

Сбрасываем изменения на один шаг назад, и принудительно пушим в мастер:

git reset --hard HEAD~1
git push origin master -f 

Смотрим изменения перед пушем

Только файлы:

git diff --stat --cached origin/master

 composer.lock | 24 ++++++++++++------------
 1 file changed, 12 insertions(+), 12 deletions(-)

Содержимое:

git diff --cached origin/master

Создание и применение патча

Создание патча

git diff --no-prefix > some-fix.patch

Применение патча:

git apply some-fix.patch

Тоже самое без git:

Создание патча

diff -Naru test.old.txt test.txt > some-fix.patch

Применение патча

patch -p0 < some-fix.patch