So you just broke that PR you’ve been working on for months?
One day, you find yourself force pushing over your already existing Pull request/branch, because like me, you like to
reuse funny names:
git fetch origin
git checkout tellmewhy #already exists and has a pull request still open, but you didn't know
git reset --hard origin/master
# hack hack hack
git commit $files
git push -f nameofmyremote
Panic!
Here’s when you realize that You’ve done something wrong, very very wrong, because github will throw the message:
Error creating pull request: Unprocessable Entity (HTTP 422)
A pull request already exists for foursixnine:tellmewhy.
So, you already broke your old PR with a completely unrelated change,
Don’t panic
If you happen to know what’s the previous commit id, you can always pick it up again (go to github.com/pulls for instance and look for the PR with the branch),
AND, AND, AAANDDDD, ABSOLUTELY ANDDDD, you haven’t ran git gc.
In my case:
@foursixnine foursixnine force-pushed the tellmewhy branch from 9e86f3a to **9714c93** 2 months ago
All there’s to do is:
git checkout $commit
# even better:
git checkout tellmewhy # old branch with new commits that are unrelated/overwritten over the old ones
git checkout -b tellmewhyagain # your new copy, open your pr from here
git push tellmewhyagain # now all is "safe" in the cloud
git checkout tellmewhy # Let's bring the dead back to life
git reset --hard 9714c93
git push -f tellmewhy
And this is it, you’ve brought the dead back to life
