Deleting a remote branch

• Let's suppose we decided we no longer need the more-letters branch.
• We can delete it with git branch -d: git branch -d more-letters.
• But even that only gets rid of the local branch. If we run git branch -a, we'll see that there's still a remote more-letters branch.
• We shouldn't leave a bunch of unused branches on our remote repo. Let's delete the remote branch, too.
• The only way Git is set up to make changes to remote repositories is through the git push command.
• So to delete a branch on a remote repository, you need to add the --delete option to git push.
• You type git push, the remote repository name, the --delete option, and the name of the branch you want to delete: git push origin --delete more-letters
• You should see a message that the remote more-letters branch has been deleted.

$ git push origin --delete more-letters
To /Users/jay/th/decoder
 - [deleted]         more-letters

"Refusing to update checked out branch" errors

If you're trying to delete a remote branch that points to a repo that's in a different directory on your local computer, you may see an error like this:

$ git push origin --delete more-letters
remote: error: refusing to update checked out branch: refs/heads/more-letters
remote: error: By default, updating the current branch in a non-bare repository
remote: is denied, because it will make the index and work tree inconsistent
remote: with what you pushed, and will require 'git reset --hard' to match
remote: the work tree to HEAD.
remote:
remote: You can set the 'receive.denyCurrentBranch' configuration variable
remote: to 'ignore' or 'warn' in the remote repository to allow pushing into
remote: its current branch; however, this is not recommended unless you
remote: arranged to update its work tree to match what you pushed in some
remote: other way.
remote:
remote: To squelch this message and still keep the default behaviour, set
remote: 'receive.denyCurrentBranch' configuration variable to 'refuse'.
To /Users/jay/th/decoder
 ! [remote rejected] more-letters (branch is currently checked out)
error: failed to push some refs to '/Users/jay/th/decoder'

If this happens, do the following:

• Change to the directory for the repo you're using as a remote: cd ../decoder
• Switch to a different branch, so that the branch you're trying to delete isn't checked out: git checkout master

Now you should be able to change back to your other repo and delete the remote branch successfully.

Note that you won't have this issue with remote repos on hosting services like GitHub, because no branches will be checked out there.