Rename local and remote branch

David Coy — Tue, 26 Feb 2019 19:51:15 +0000

We've all been there (or maybe you haven't, hopefully this helps prevent what's to follow): cloning the project, making changes in our local branch, then commiting those changes to the repository, only to find you didn't follow the contribution guidelines for branch naming. Recently, I opened a merge request against the docs for GitLab, but didn't follow our documentation guidelines for branch naming as I should have.

Initially, I created my branch: add-efs-warning, committed my changes and opened up the merge request. However, this was wrong as the branch name also needs to be prefixed with docs/, docs-, or -docs. Rather than copying the changes I made to a blank text file, changing to the master branch, deleting the old branch, then creating a new branch and applying the changes, I learned how to rename my local branch and remote branch.

Let's say you did the exact same thing I did and you're on your wrongly named local branch -- let's call it bad-branch-name. If you want to rename the branch, you can run:

git branch -m docs/new-branch-name

This will rename the current local branch to docs/new-branch-name and avoid feedback from the technical writers that review your changes. Next, you can run the following command to rename bad-branch-name to docs/new-branch-name and push the new local branch:

git push origin :bad-branch-name docs/new-branch-name

Finally, you can reset the upstream branch for the new local branch (switch to the branch if you're not currently working in it):

git push origin -u docs/new-branch-name

Cover image by Teddy Kelley on Unsplash

Hi, I'm David Coy

David Coy — Wed, 12 Apr 2017 01:37:38 +0000

I have been coding for about two years.

You can find me on GitHub as obsidianspork

I live in Texas.

I work for the Linux Academy as a Customer Support Engineer!

I mostly program in these languages: Ruby and JavaScript whenever I have time.

I am currently learning more about Ruby on Rails.

Nice to meet you!

DEV Community: David Coy

Rename local and remote branch

Hi, I'm David Coy