When to delete branches in Git?

Question

Suppose we have an application that\'s stable.

Tomorrow, someone reports a big ol\' bug that we decide to hotfix right away. So we create a branch for that hotfix off o

Answer 1

I would add that the disadvantage of deleting branches is that you will break any hyperlinks to those branches on GitHub (this question is tagged github). You'll get a 404 Not Found error for those links. This is why I change my links to point to a commit or tag after I delete a branch on GitHub.

Because some links can't be changed, such as in email, I now avoid hyperlinking to GitHub branches entirely and link to a commit or tag from day one.

I prefer to delete branches after they're merged in. This prevents the visual clutter of a long list of branches in your repository. These branches also get propagated to all of the repository's forks.

First I delete my local branch. This prevents it from being accidentally pushed later.

git branch -d branchName

Then I delete the remote tracking branch

git branch -dr remoteName\branchName

Then I delete the branch on GitHub. I use the web interface, but the equivalent command is below.

git push remoteName :branchName

Even if the branch is never merged, typically I would still like to keep the commits around for posterity. However I still like to delete the branch. To spread the commits around and to keep them from being eaten by the garbage collector, I make an annotated tag pointing to the same commit as the deleted branch.

git tag -a tagName commitOrBranchName

Then I push the tag to github

git push remoteName tagName

Answer 2

You can delete branches in all major web UIs such as github, BitBucket. After deleting the branch online, you can delete the local branch using

git remote prune origin