How to do a forced-push to another branch in Git

The + needs to come at the beginning of the argument representing the couple.

git push origin +localBranchName:remoteBranchName

That's hard to remember sometimes, so there's also the --force flag.

git push origin --force localBranchName:remoteBranchName

But be aware if you push multiple branches with that flag, then they will all be force pushed.

git push origin --force localBranchName:remoteBranchName anotherLocalBranch

In that case, you may not have wanted to force push anotherLocalBranch, so you should instead use the + to specify which ones you want forced.

git push origin +localBranchNameForced:remoteBranchName localBranchNotForced:remoteBranchNotForced +anotherLocalBranchForcePushedToUpstreamTracking

Do read Torek's answer for a better explanation, and check out some of his other answers for world-class knowledge on git.

Some people are not reading Jeff Puckett's answer first. Do that! This answer is about the use of the + force-push character, not about force-pushing in general.

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Just to be a bit more complete than the accepted answer: the syntax for a refspec is [+][src][:dst], with at most one of src and :dst being omitted (so that the empty string and + by itself are both invalid).

Hence the non---force syntax for your case is +local:remote, rather than local:+remote.

Using --force has the effect of adding the + in front of every refspec, i.e., these two are equivalent:

git push --force origin someBranch local:remote anotherBranch
git push origin +someBranch +local:remote +anotherBranch