Deleting branches in Git

Creating a new branch for everything you are working on will lead to a lot of branches in your repository. These stale branches will mess up your repository and make it harder to find a specific branch. Therefore, you should know how to delete branches locally and remotely.

Deleting a local branch

After finishing a task and merging it into your development or master branch, you may want to delete your local branch for this task. You can delete a local branch by using the branch command with the -d flag:

git branch -d featureXYZ

To delete a local branch, you should have switched to another branch beforehand. Also, for using the -d flag, the branch must be fully merged in its upstream branch.

If this is not given and you still want to delete a local branch, you can force the deletion with the -D flag:

git branch -D featureXYZ

Deleting a remote branch

For deleting a remote branch, you won't need the branch command but the push command instead. This might be surprising. In case that we wanted to delete a remote branch called "featureXYZ", the command would look as follows:

git push -d origin featureXYZ

or

git push origin :featureXYZ

Tip

You may specify multiple branches for deletion.

Reference

For full reference see Git branch documentation and Git push documentation.