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How do you remove an invalid remote branch reference from Git?

In my current repo I have the following output:

$ git branch -a
* master
  remotes/origin/master
  remotes/public/master

I want to delete remotes/public/master from the branch list:

$ git branch -d remotes/public/master
error: branch 'remotes/public/master' not found.

Also, the output of git remote is strange, since it does not list public:

$ git remote show 
origin

How can I delete 'remotes/public/master' from the branch list?

Update, tried the git push command:

$ git push public :master
fatal: 'public' does not appear to be a git repository
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly
Did git remote prune [remote-name] or git fetch -p [remote-name] not work in your scenario? Doing it with git gc is a lot more forceful than is normally needed.
git remote prune [remote-name] won't work with git svn, although neither does git gc... git branch -rd origin/name does work though. @Casey, you probably should select the second answer -it's slightly less dangerous.
I love this question. Coming back almost every month
Related, if not a dupe target: Delete a Git branch both locally and remotely.
To avoid n00b gitter error in the future, I recommend using a different example branch than master...particularly when deleting on the remote.

A
Arsen Khachaturyan

You might be needing a cleanup:

git gc --prune=now

or you might be needing a prune:

git remote prune public

prune Deletes all stale tracking branches under . These stale branches have already been removed from the remote repository referenced by , but are still locally available in "remotes/". With --dry-run option, report what branches will be pruned, but do no actually prune them.

However, it appears these should have been cleaned up earlier with

git remote rm public 

rm Remove the remote named . All remote tracking branches and configuration settings for the remote are removed.

So it might be you hand-edited your config file and this did not occur, or you have privilege problems.

Maybe run that again and see what happens.

Advice Context

If you take a look in the revision logs, you'll note I suggested more "correct" techniques, which for whatever reason didn't want to work on their repository.

I suspected the OP had done something that left their tree in an inconsistent state that caused it to behave a bit strangely, and git gc was required to fix up the left behind cruft.

Usually git branch -rd origin/badbranch is sufficient for nuking a local tracking branch , or git push origin :badbranch for nuking a remote branch, and usually you will never need to call git gc


I don't want to delete the branch on the remote side. I think there is a subtle difference.
er, the question is effectively asking "how do I delete a remote branch". Thats what those paths are.
I will rephrase the subject if that makes it more clear what I'm asking, but the command show exactly what my problem is.
git gc isn't needed here, but git remote prune makes me feel safer than manually deleting things with git branch -rd, since git is verifying which remote branches are done.
this didn't work for me - the 'git branch -rd' worked fine, however.
P
Pawan Maheshwari

All you need to do is

git fetch -p

It'll remove all your local branches which are remotely deleted.

If you are on git 1.8.5+ you can set this automatically

git config fetch.prune true

or

git config --global fetch.prune true

This is what I was looking for as well - the question is describing a scenario more complicated than the common one.
I'm looking for a way to delete local branches where the corresponding remote has been deleted, but this doesnt work for me. Any idea why?
This removes the branches listed in remote/origin but doesn't delete local tracking branches, which is just as important.
@Cupcake Since you didn't roll back my first edit (which was fixing the incorrect information about Git 1.8.5+), you have now made this incorrect. My second edit was fixing what I put in that was incorrect, which is now there again (with your rollback). Please go ahead and roll back one more edit to have the original. Thanks.
@ferventcoder I double checked your last edit, and rolled back to it. The OP can rollback again if he doesn't like it. Thanks.
A
Alan Haggai Alavi
git push public :master

This would delete the remote branch named master as Kent Fredric has pointed out.

To list remote-tracking branches:

git branch -r

To delete a remote-tracking branch:

git branch -rd public/master

This helped me to remove a git-svn remote ghost branch.
git branch -rd removed_remote/branch worked for me, while the git gc --prune=now was worthless.
I've been able to use git prune without any issues, but my co-worker who forked our main repo **COULD ONLY ** use the git branch -rd public/master-style solution to clean his environment up.
git branch -rd public/master was what I was missing. I had heroku/master and herkou/master ... lol woops
@rchampourlier Not 100% worthless - if your git repo is big, removing the unused branches can free a lot of disk space in some situations.
j
jpswain

All you need to do is

$ git branch -rd origin/whatever 

It's that simple. There is no reason to call a gc here.


how do you "push" that delete to github?
@Thufir That's not what this question was about. This question was specifcally for situations when you have an invalid remote reference in the local repo, but that branch no longer exists on the remote server. The answer to your question is $ git push origin :whatever
Yes, if something happens on the remote repo where a branch is deleted, but you still have reference to that remote branch on your local machine, then you would need to do what I put in my original answer to clean it up.
If you have a big cleanup job (lots of dangling remotes), you could just delete all remote branches with something like git branch -rd $(git branch -r) then reestablish the valid ones by doing a fetch.
My situation was that I had used git config -e to rename my remote. I renamed the remote mine to origin. Then, this was the solution that worked best for me: git branch -rd $(git branch -r | grep 'mine/')
y
yojimbo87

git gc --prune=now is not what you want.

git remote prune public

or git remote prune origin # if thats the the remote source

is what you want


@Casey $ git gc # does like a defragment for the git files to speed up the respository $ git remote prune origin # will clean up the delete the stale remote branches that show up with "git branch -r | grep origin". Thats what the question is asking I believe. So, the commands are totally different.
c
chris

The accepted answer didn't work for me when the ref was packed. This does however:

$ git remote add public http://anything.com/bogus.git
$ git remote rm public

Worked for me. Regular git branch -d was not working,returned error that branch does not exists, because I removed origin called "original", that was created by mistake, directly in .git/config file.
This is the method I had to use to remove branches that were inadvertently omitted from my .git/config (which had to be rebuilt due to an unrelated corruption). It's too bad this answer was so far down the chain that I didn't notice it until at long last I found the solution and went to add it to the accepted answer!
This is what I needed after using svn2git. There were a lot of remotes/svn/* branches. Had to create a bogus 'svn' remote first.
C
Community

In my case I was trying to delete entries that were saved in .git/packed-refs. You can edit this plain text file and delete entries from it that git br -D doesn't know how to touch (At least in ver 1.7.9.5).

I found this solution here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/11050880/1695680


wow, this helped me. My colleague tried, restart VS, Restart his computer nothing worked, he deleted his local repo and pull everything to get rid of this :)
Today I leanred that this packed-refs file is created as part of git gc, when it packs your commits into a highly-compressed archive it also moved the references into a single plain text file, possibly for optimization purposes; I hope future versions of git can git br -D ... packed refs.
k
kip2
git push origin --delete <branch name>

Referenced from: http://www.gitguys.com/topics/adding-and-removing-remote-branches/


c
clacke

I didn't know about git branch -rd, so the way I have solved issues like this for myself is to treat my repo as a remote repo and do a remote delete. git push . :refs/remotes/public/master. If the other ways don't work and you have some weird reference you want to get rid of, this raw way is surefire. It gives you the exact precision to remove (or create!) any kind of reference.


J
JGlass

Only slightly related, but still might be helpful in the same situation as we had - we use a network file share for our remote repository. Last week things were working, this week we were getting the error "Remote origin did not advertise Ref for branch refs/heads/master. This Ref may not exist in the remote or may be hidden by permission settings"

But we believed nothing had been done to corrupt things. The NFS does snapshots so I reviewed each "previous version" and saw that three days ago, the size in MB of the repository had gone from 282MB to 33MB, and about 1,403 new files and 300 folders now existed. I queried my co-workers and one had tried to do a push that day - then cancelled it.

I used the NFS "Restore" functionality to restore it to just before that date and now everythings working fine again. I did try the prune previously, didnt seem to help. Maybe the harsher cleanups would have worked.

Hope this might help someone else one day!

Jay


D
Danger Rodriguez Gálvez

I had a similar problem. None of the answers helped. In my case, I had two removed remote repositories showing up permanently.

My last idea was to remove all references to it by hand.

Let's say the repository is called “Repo”. I did:

find .git -name Repo 

So, I deleted the corresponding files and directories from the .git folder (this folder could be found in your Rails app or on your computer https://stackoverflow.com/a/19538763/6638513).

Then I did:

grep Repo -r .git

This found some text files in which I removed the corresponding lines. Now, everything seems to be fine.

Usually, you should leave this job to git.


G
Glenn Slayden

Not sure how I got into the mess, but my error message was slightly different:

> git remote > git branch warning: ignoring broken ref refs/remotes/origin/HEAD * main >

But I was able to fix it by slightly reinterpreting a fix from elsewhere on this page. By this I mean I substituted the keyword HEAD for the branch name in <remote>/<branch>. None of the other suggestions people mentioned had worked (gc, prune, etc.) so I was running out of ideas and hoping for the best. Anyway, it worked like a charm:

> git remote > git branch -rd origin/HEAD Deleted remote-tracking branch origin/HEAD (was refs/remotes/origin/main). > git branch * main >


M
Marvin Thobejane

I tried everything here and nothing worked. If all else fails, remove the offending branches from the text file '.git/packed-refs', then remove the offending branches from '.git\refs\remotes\origin'