How do I clear my local working directory in Git?

All the answers so far retain local commits. If you're really serious, you can discard all local commits and all local edits by doing:

git reset --hard origin/branchname

For example:

git reset --hard origin/master

This makes your local repository exactly match the state of the origin (other than untracked files).

If you accidentally did this after just reading the command, and not what it does :), use git reflog to find your old commits.


You could create a commit which contains an empty working copy.

This is a generally safe, non-destructive approach because it does not involve the use of any brute-force reset mechanisms. First you hide all managed content with git checkout empty, then you are free to manually review and remove whatever unmanaged content remains.

## create a stand-alone, tagged, empty commit
true | git mktree | xargs git commit-tree | xargs git tag empty

## clear the working copy
git checkout empty

Your working copy should now be clear of any managed content. All that remains are unmanaged files and the .git folder itself.

To re-populate your working copy...

git checkout master ## or whatever branch you will be using

If you're a forward thinking individual, you might start your repository off on the right foot by basing everything on an initial empty commit...

git init
git commit --allow-empty --allow-empty-message -m ""
git tag empty
...

There are various uses for a tagged empty worktree. My favorite at the moment is to depopulate the root under a set of git worktree subfolders.


Use:

git clean -df

It's not well advertised, but git clean is really handy. Git Ready has a nice introduction to git clean.


To reset a specific file to the last-committed state (to discard uncommitted changes in a specific file):

git checkout thefiletoreset.txt

This is mentioned in the git status output:

(use "git checkout -- <file>..." to discard changes in working directory)

To reset the entire repository to the last committed state:

git reset --hard

To remove untracked files, I usually just delete all files in the working copy (but not the .git/ folder!), then do git reset --hard which leaves it with only committed files.

A better way is to use git clean (warning: using the -x flag as below will cause Git to delete ignored files): 

git clean -d -x -f

will remove untracked files, including directories (-d) and files ignored by git (-x). Replace the -f argument with -n to perform a dry-run or -i for interactive mode, and it will tell you what will be removed.

Relevant links:

  • git-reset man page
  • git-clean man page
  • git ready "cleaning up untracked files" (as Marko posted)
  • Stack Overflow question "How to remove local (untracked) files from the current Git working tree")

Tags:

Git

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