gitbranchgit-track

How do you stop tracking a remote branch in Git?

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:

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?

Solution

  • 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 reference that is tracking the remote branch, i.e., the "remote tracking branch" (reference stored locally, as I explained here):

    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>.