Branches

Git branches are a fundamental concept in Git that allow you to diverge from the main line of development and continue to work without interfering with that main line. Think of a branch as a separate timeline of your project’s history. Branching in Git is a lightweight, versatile way to manage various aspects of your project’s development and collaboration.

Listing branches

To list the branches you have locally on your machine you can use

git branch

To list all the branches locally and remotely

git branch -a

To list only the remote branches

git branch -r

New Branch

To create a new branch locally from the current working branch

git branch <new-branch-name>

The new branch will include the commits of the current working branch

To switch to a local branch to make it the current use one

git checkout <new-branch-name>

We can merge the two above commands into one command by

git checkout -b <new-branch-name>

But to make a local branch from a remote branch

git checkout -t -b <new-branch> origin/<exitsted-remote-branch>

where -b to create a new branch and -t to track the remote branch (the Upstream)

Rename Branch

To rename a local branch

git branch -m <old-branch> <new-name>

Push Branch

Pushing the branch means push it to a remote repository, so you can push a local branch by

git push -u origin <branch-name>

And this will make a new branch on the remote repo.

But if you want to push the changes of the tracked remote branch you can just use

git push

Delete Branch

To delete a local branch

git branch -d <branch-name>

Sync remote branches

To delete the remote branches that is already deleted from the remote repo and make your local repo branch list up to date.

git fetch --prune