From the official documentation on dealing with Protected Branches:

1. Navigate to your project’s Settings ➔ Repository
2. Scroll to find the Protected branches section.
3. From the Branch dropdown menu, select the branch you want to protect and click Protect.

Following the steps above, you should be greeted with a box similar to this one below.

There, you can click either:

• "Allowed to force push" toggle button, or
• the orange Unprotect button

for the branch you want to force push to, e.g., master.

If you don't want to navigate through the navigation bars, you can also fill out this URL template:

and replace <USERNAME> and <PROJECTNAME> with your specific username and project name, respectively.

Note, the "Allowed to force push" button is probably favored over un-selecting the Unprotect button because branch protection gives you additional safety from accidentally deleting your branch. But either option appears to work.

More help:

• Community discussion on force pushing on branch
• Official documentation to do so

As the GitLab documentation states: By default, a protected branch does four simple things:

• It prevents its creation, if not already created, from everybody except users with Maintainer permission.
• It prevents pushes from everybody except users with Allowed permission.
• It prevents anyone from force pushing to the branch. <-----
• It prevents anyone from deleting the branch.

So you need to unprotect the branch temporarily. Finally, return it to its original state.

For doing that :

1. Navigate to your project’s Settings ➔ Repository
2. Scroll to find the Protected branches section.
3. Unprotected the branch which you want to force push
4. Force push
5. Revert all settings back in project’s Settings ➔ Repository (gitlab)

1. Temporarily unprotect the master branch.
2. Push as how you did before.
3. Then restore the protection to the branch.