Question

I accidentally created a branch and pushed it to the origin. I created it out of another branch, but didn’t commit any changes, so it should be “identical” to the original branch.

I want to remove the branch, so I first removed it locally with:

git branch -d <branch_name>

and then I wanted to remove from the remote location with:

git push origin :<branch_name>

but this gave me the error:

error: unable to push to unqualified destination: The
destination refspec neither matches an existing ref on the remote nor
begins with refs/, and we are unable to guess a prefix based on the
source ref. fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly

I found information about this error on another thread in StackOverflow (Cannot delete a remote branch created unintentionally) and on other sites (git: prune to remove old remote tracking branches), but the solution they propose:

git remote prune origin

does not work for me. The prunning command exits correctly, but I still see the branch when I git branch -r or git branch -a.

I have also tried git remote update and git fetch but that didn’t change anything.

How can I remove this branch from the list of branches?

Answer 1

Try git fetch --prune origin.

Otherwise you could manually remove the branch from your local repository and see if it comes back on git fetch (in which case it wasn’t removed on the remote):

git branch -d -r origin/branch