Git "Your local changes would be overwritten by merge": keep them, or throw them away

1. See what you changed

You can follow along in the terminal, where a pull has just been refused:

git status
git diff config.yml

Look before choosing. It may be a change you forgot, a debug line, or an edit a tool made on its own.

2. Keep them: commit

If the change is real work, commit it, then bring in the remote commits on top of yours:

git add config.yml
git commit -m "Update config"
git pull --rebase

Now both sides have commits, so a plain git pull would ask whether to merge or rebase: rejected (fetch first) explains the choice. If both sides changed the same lines, you get a conflict to resolve, which is normal. Then git push. And if the push is refused, see rejected (fetch first).

3. Keep them: stash

If it’s not ready to commit, set it aside, pull, and put it back:

git stash
git pull
git stash pop

git stash list shows what’s stashed. If pop reports a conflict, your changes are still in the stash: fix the conflict, then git stash drop.

Git can do this for you, in one step:

git pull --rebase --autostash

Or always, with git config --global rebase.autoStash true together with pull.rebase true.

4. Discard them

If you don’t need the changes:

git restore config.yml

Or every change in the working tree, which really can’t be undone:

git restore .

On Git older than 2.23, the same is git checkout -- config.yml. Unlike a stash, nothing is kept.

5. The same error with checkout

error: Your local changes to the following files would be overwritten by checkout:
  config.yml
Please commit your changes or stash them before you switch branches.

Same choices. Or carry the changes over to the other branch, if they don’t conflict there, with git switch -m other-branch.

6. Untracked files

A slightly different message means the files aren’t in Git at all, and the incoming commits add files with the same names:

error: The following untracked working tree files would be overwritten by merge:
  build/app.js
Please move or remove them before you merge.

Move them aside, or delete them if they’re generated. To see what git clean would remove, first run it with -n:

git clean -n
git clean -f build/

Generated files that keep causing this belong in .gitignore, and out of the repository. The .gitignore Generator has templates, and .gitignore not working explains removing files Git already tracks.

7. On a server

A deploy that runs git pull on a server, where someone edited a file by hand, fails like this on every deploy. Find out what changed with git diff, then move that change into the repository or into a config file Git doesn’t track. Don’t edit tracked files on servers.

For a deploy that should always match the remote exactly, discarding anything local:

git fetch origin
git reset --hard origin/main

Use that only where nobody works by hand. It throws away local commits too.