How to rename a local and remote branch in git

Before going into the details, let's look at some of the reasons why we want to rename a branch,

• typos in the branch name
• created a branch with a name and then realize, that branch does more than that (e.g, add-client to crud-client)
• created a dummy name (eg., yet-another-branch to fix/reports)
• Also to add more details about the branch (e.g, feat/branch-name, fix/branch-name)

and so on

How to rename a branch locally

In this example, we are going to rename the branch from old-reports to new-reports.

## go to the old branch
git checkout old-reports

## Rename the branch to a new name
git branch -m new-reports

-m in git denotes, move this old branch to new branch and remove the old branch.

How to rename the branch remotely

What if the old branch is pushed to remote origin. Its very simple, delete the old remote branch first and push the new local branch to remote origin.

For deleting a remote branch,

git push origin -d old-reports

Here -d or --delete will delete the old branch remotely. If you specify -D, it will only delete locally not in the remote origin.

then push the current branch to origin,

git push -u origin new-reports

Hope you learned a trick to rename a local and remote branch in your git repository 😎

Comments

[temnur]

What if branch is currently using in pull request?