How to Delete a Git Branch Both Locally and Remotely?

While working with Git, you likely happen across a situation where you want to delete a git branch. But before jumping into the complexities of deleting a branch, let's see how you would go about deleting a branch in the local Git repository and then in a remote.

To delete a branch, we have first to delete the branch locally and then move forward with deleting the remote branch.

To demonstrate this, I have created a Github repo with a branch to be deleted.

From the screenshot above I want to delete the branch named test-branch.

Deleting a local branch

First, we list out all the branches (local as well as remote), using the git branch command with -a (all) flag.

$ git branch -a

Output:

login
  master
  *test-branch
  remotes/origin/master
  remotes/origin/test-branch

Note: Make sure you are not in the branch which you want to delete.

In the output above * denotes the current branch I'm in. We can see that I'm currently in test-branch.

So it means that I need to checkout to another branch, in order to checkout to another branch run the command below.

$ git checkout master

Now I've checkout out to master. To confirm run the git branch -a command again.

Output:

login
  *master
  test-branch
  remotes/origin/master
  remotes/origin/test-branch

To delete the local branch, just run the git branch command with the -d (delete) flag, followed by the name (test-branch branch in this case) of the branch you want to delete.

$ git branch -d test-branch

Output:

Deleted branch test-branch (was a4f0911).

Note: You can also use the -D flag which is synonymous with --delete --force instead of -d. This will delete the branch regardless of its merge status.

Even after deleting the branch locally, we can still see the branch in the repository.

Deleting a remote branch

To delete a remote branch, you cannot use the git branch command. Instead, use the git push command with --delete flag, followed by the name of the branch you want to delete (test-branch branch in this case).

$ git push origin --delete test-branch

Output:

To https://github.com/Pratap22/git-guide.git
 - [deleted]         test-branch

Screenshot of remote repo.

Finally, the branch was deleted from the repository as well.

Conclusion

I hope this article has helped you with the process of deleting a git branch both locally and remote repository.

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