Delete a local and a remote GIT branch

Have you ever gone through a few sprints of work, created several local and remote branches and wondering how to get rid of them (both local and remote branches)?

Here some tips to do that:

Delete a Local GIT branch

To delete the local GIT branch we can try one of the following commands:

git branch -d branch_name
git branch -D branch_name

as you can see above, we have 2 different argument, one with ‘d’ and one with ‘D’.

The -d option stands for --delete, which would delete the local branch, only if you have already pushed and merged it with your remote branches.

The -D option stands for --delete --force, which deletes the branch regardless of its push and merge status, so be careful using this one!

Delete a remote GIT branch

To delete a remote branch you can use the following command:

git push <remote_name> --delete <branch_name>

Alternatively, there is this other following option too, which might be just a bit hard to remember:

$ git push <remote_name> :<branch_name>

These top options can also be used if you want to delete a “tag”.

Push to remote branch and delete

If you ever want to push your local branch to remote and delete your local, you can use git push with the -d option as an alias for --delete.