Every time you Force Push, you’re rewriting history. Ever seen a movie where the character goes back in time, changes history, and everything goes well? Me neither.

Whenever you run the Force push command, PFP has a look at your local repository and copies to the remote side whatever is missing. This includes commits, trees, blobs, and tags (the last of which are not pushed by default).

After copying the missing content, PFP attempts to overwrite the current master with the latest commit. This overwrite is allowed if the change is a “fast forward”, that is if the old master commit is an ancestor of the new master commit.

If there is a linear path, the command succeeds. When it’s not allowed (most likely because the remote repo looked different from yours, apart from your new commits), the command fails.

The command will always succeed, however, if you resort to the --force flag. You will overwrite the remote’s commit history with your local one, regardless of how different it looks.

As you can see, this is a powerful command — but, as a famous web-slinger once taught us, "With great power comes great responsibility".

So should you use it?