GIT Part-7

Deleting things in remote repository

As with forced pushes, things in remote repositories must be deleted with extreme precaution. Before deleting anything, every collaborator should be informed about it.

Actually, when we are pushing commits, branches, etc., we are pushing them to a ref destination, but we don’t have to specify the destination explicitly.

The explicit syntax is the following:

git push origin <source>:<destination>

So, the way of deleting remote things is updating the refs to prior states, or pushing “nothing”.

Let’s see how to do it for every case.

Deleting commits

This is just the same as deleting commits locally, for example, to delete the last two commits:

git push origin HEAD~2:master --force

If we are using HEAD to refer the commits to remove, we must ensure that it’s located on the same branch as remote.

Note that these pushes have to be forced too.

Deleting branches

This is quite simple, is just about pushing “nothing”, as said before. The following would remove dev branch from remote repository:

git push origin :dev

Remote branches should be removed when the local branch is removed.

Deleting tags

As same as with branches, we have to push “nothing”, e.g.:

git push origin --tags :v1.0

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