delete-topic-branch.md

Delete a topic branch

The main development branch is usually called master. If you have multiple releases of the project, then you usually have a distinct branch for each release, e.g. 1.0, 1.1, 1.1.1, 1.2. If you are working on a change that may be an experiment, or may take a few days, then you might create a topic branch from the current master and do the work there.

Topic branches are often pushed to a remote repository. This is done so there is a backup of the local branch (you don't want to lose work to a hard disk crash or human error), or so that multiple developers can collaborate on the work.

If you merge that topic branch back into master (see Git steps after completing a topic branch) then you probably want to get rid of the topic branch. That's straightforward if you have not pushed it to a remote repository, and just a little less simple if you have.

Delete the local topic branch

Make sure the current branch is master, or at least some other branch than the one you want to delete. Delete the topic branch using git branch -d; the example below deletes the topic branch t-something.

git branch -d t-something

Delete the remote topic branch

If you had pushed the topic branch to the remote repository then you can delete the remote branch with this command.

git push origin :t-something

Other developers will see the local topic removed when they sync their local repo using something like:

git fetch --all --recurse-submodules
git remote prune origin