How do you stop tracking a remote branch in Git?

Question

How do you stop tracking a remote branch in Git?

I am asking to stop tracking because in my concrete case, I want to delete the local branch, but not the remote one. Deleting the local one and pushing the deletion to remote will delete the remote branch as well:

• How do I delete a Git branch both locally and in GitHub?

Can I just do git branch -d the_branch, and it won't get propagated when I later git push?

Will it only propagate if I were to run git push origin :the_branch later on?

Answer 1

As mentioned in Yoshua Wuyts' answer, using git branch:

git branch --unset-upstream

Other options:

You don't have to delete your local branch.

Simply delete the local branch that is tracking the remote branch:

git branch -d -r origin/<remote branch name>

-r, --remotes tells git to delete the remote-tracking branch (i.e., delete the branch set to track the remote branch). This will not delete the branch on the remote repo!

See "Having a hard time understanding git-fetch"

there's no such concept of local tracking branches, only remote tracking branches.
So origin/master is a remote tracking branch for master in the origin repo

As mentioned in Dobes Vandermeer's answer, you also need to reset the configuration associated to the local branch:

git config --unset branch.<branch>.remote
git config --unset branch.<branch>.merge

Remove the upstream information for <branchname>.
If no branch is specified it defaults to the current branch.

(git 1.8+, Oct. 2012, commit b84869e by Carlos Martín Nieto (carlosmn))

That will make any push/pull completely unaware of origin/<remote branch name>.

Answer 2

To remove the upstream for the current branch do:

$ git branch --unset-upstream

This is available for Git v.1.8.0 or newer. (Sources: 1.7.9 ref, 1.8.0 ref)

source

Answer 3

To remove the association between the local and remote branch run:

git config --unset branch.<local-branch-name>.remote
git config --unset branch.<local-branch-name>.merge

Optionally delete the local branch afterwards if you don't need it:

git branch -d <branch>

This won't delete the remote branch.

Answer 4

The simplest way is to edit .git/config

Here is an example file

[core]
        repositoryformatversion = 0
        filemode = true
        bare = false
        logallrefupdates = true
        ignorecase = true
[remote "origin"]
        url = git@example.com:repo-name
        fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
[branch "test1"]
        remote = origin
        merge = refs/heads/test1
[branch "master"]
        remote = origin
        merge = refs/heads/master

Delete the line merge = refs/heads/test1 in the test1 branch section

Answer 5

You can delete the remote-tracking branch using

git branch -d -r origin/<remote branch name>

as VonC mentions above. However, if you keep your local copy of the branch, git push will still try to push that branch (which could give you a non-fast-forward error as it did for ruffin). This is because the config push.default defaults to matching which means:

matching - push all matching branches. All branches having the same name in both ends are considered to be matching. This is the default.

(see http://git-scm.com/docs/git-config under push.default)

Seeing as this is probably not what you wanted when you deleted the remote-tracking branch, you can set push.default to upstream (or tracking if you have git < 1.7.4.3)

upstream - push the current branch to its upstream branch.

using

git config push.default upstream

and git will stop trying to push branches that you have "stopped tracking."

Note: The simpler solution would be to just rename your local branch to something else. That would eliminate some potential for confusion, as well.

Answer 6

Here's a one-liner to remove all remote-tracking branches matching a pattern:

git branch -rd $(git branch -a | grep '{pattern}' | cut -d'/' -f2-10 | xargs)

Answer 7

This is not an answer to the question, but I couldn't figure out how to get decent code formatting in a comment above... so auto-down-reputation-be-damned here's my comment.

I have the recipe submtted by @Dobes in a fancy shmancy [alias] entry in my .gitconfig:

# to untrack a local branch when I can't remember 'git config --unset'
cbr = "!f(){ git symbolic-ref -q HEAD 2>/dev/null | sed -e 's|refs/heads/||'; }; f"
bruntrack = "!f(){ br=${1:-`git cbr`};  \
    rm=`git config --get branch.$br.remote`; \
    tr=`git config --get branch.$br.merge`; \
    [ $rm:$tr = : ] && echo \"# untrack: not a tracking branch: $br\" && return 1; \
    git config --unset branch.$br.remote; git config --unset branch.$br.merge; \
    echo \"# untrack: branch $br no longer tracking $rm:$tr\"; return 0; }; f"

Then I can just run

$ git bruntrack branchname

Answer 8

git branch --unset-upstream stops tracking all the local branches, which is not desirable.

Remove the [branch "branch-name"] section from the .git/config file followed by

git branch -D 'branch-name' && git branch -D -r 'origin/branch-name'

works out the best for me.

Answer 9

You can use this way to remove your remote branch

git remote remove <your remote branch name>

Answer 10

The easiest way to do this is to delete the branch remotely and then use:

git fetch --prune (aka git fetch -p)