Working with branches in Git

Git, with its concept of data as a stream of snapshots rather than the differences over time, local repository etc. provides quite a few benefits over other VCS's. That being said, it is not exactly a piece of cake to get started with. Remember, with great power comes great responsibility.

In this post, I will list out a few very basic commands in order to get started with Git branching.

Create a branch

In order to create a branch (locally), run the following command :-

git checkout -b new_branch

Next up, we need to push this branch to the remote server, which is done as follows :-

git push origin new_branch

Delete a branch locally

The following command deletes a branch from the local repository.

git branch -d new_branch

Sometimes, you might need to force delete a branch if it has changes.

git branch -D new_branch

Delete a branch from remote

A remote branch can be deleted in more than one way.

git push origin --delete new_branch

                             or

git push origin :new_branch

The last command essentially pushes void to the remote branch, which is this deleted.