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This article shows how we can ignore local file changes in Git when updating from a remote repository. Sometimes, git pullGit may give an error like the one shown below when you try to run .

Updating 0376abc..1chd7a5 error: Your local changes to the following files would be overwritten by merge: README.md Please, commit your changes or stash them before you can merge. Aborting

So, what should we do?

Ignore local file changes in Git

In simple terms, the error message above indicates that we need to remove or save uncommitted changes to avoid conflicts when merging. git pullThis is usually the case when the command will create a file in the location of our uncommitted changes.

To fix this, we need to clean up our index. We can remove the tracked files using the git checkout command as shown below.

In our case, the README.md file may be causing the conflict. To remove the file from the index, we would run:

$ git checkout README.md

This will discard the staged changes and revert the README.md file to its last committed state. If we have untracked files that may cause conflicts, we can use git cleanthe command as shown below.

$ git clean -fd

It will remove all untracked files and folders from our index. Our repository is now ready to proceed git pull.

We have already discussed removing files from the index. Keep in mind that the above method will discard your changes.

What if we want to keep uncommitted changes?

The simplest way to clean up the index without discarding changes involves git stashthe command. We can stash tracked changes using the command shown below.

$ git stash

If we had an untracked file in our index, we would run:

$ git stash -u

The above command will store both tracked and untracked changes.

We can now run git pullthe command and apply our stashed changes as shown below.

$ git stash pop

The above command will pop the stashed changes and apply them to our index.

In short, git pullpull requests require that your index is clean. You can remove uncommitted changes or stash them before updating from remote.

This will ensure that you don't get merge conflicts with uncommitted changes.