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

779
votes

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
12
gitbranchremote-branch
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. – rjmunro
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. – naught101
I love this question. Coming back almost every month – oluckyman
Related, if not a dupe target: Delete a Git branch both locally and remotely. – user456814
To avoid n00b gitter error in the future, I recommend using a different example branch than master...particularly when deleting on the remote. – absynce

12 Answers

781
votes

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 <name>. These stale branches have already been removed from the remote repository referenced by <name>, but are still locally available in "remotes/<name>".

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 <name>. 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

726
votes

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
331
votes
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
171
votes

All you need to do is 

$ git branch -rd origin/whatever

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

72
votes

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

31
votes

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
7
votes

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

4
votes
git push origin --delete <branch name>

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

3
votes

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.

2
votes

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

2
votes

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.

0
votes

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
>