How to Rename Git Local and Remote Branches

Sometimes, you will need to rename a local or remote branch in Git, for one reason or another.

In this post, we're going to learn how you can rename a local or remote branch in Git.

Renaming local branches

Renaming a local branch is easy. Simply use the git branch command and pass it the -m flag.

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

This will rename the local branch <old-branch-name> to <new-branch-name> locally.

Now delete the old branch remotely:

BASH
git push origin --delete <old-branch-name>

Pushing new branch to remote

Now that you've deleted the old branch from the remote, you can push your newly-renamed branch to remote.

This is how you can push a new branch to remote:

BASH
git push origin <new-branch-name>

Now, simply reset the upstream branch to the new remote branch:

BASH
git push origin -u <new-branch-name>

That's it, you should have successfully renamed your branch locally, then reflected the updates on remote.

Conclusion

In this post, we learned how to rename your branch locally, then push these changes to remote.

Hopefully, you've found this useful.

Happy coding!

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