How do you remove an invalid remote branch reference from Git

Question

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

User · Accepted Answer

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  lt name   These stale branches have already been removed from the remote repository referenced by  lt name   but are still locally available in  remotes  lt 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  lt 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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

git push origin --delete  lt branch name gt    Referenced from  http   www gitguys com topics adding-and-removing-remote-branches

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

All you need to do is     git branch -rd origin whatever   It s that simple  There is no reason to call a gc here

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

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