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This article explains how we can stop tracking a remote branch in Git. By now, you must be very familiar with the concept of tracking remote branches.

This session will cover the various methods you can use to stop tracking a remote branch. Let's jump right in.

Stop tracking a remote branch in Git

This is a list of all the remote-tracking branches in our repository.

If you recall, newer versions of Git will show remote tracking branches in blue. So we can see that Dev2.1 in our local repository is tracking Dev2.1 in our remote origin.

We can stop tracking a remote branch using the following steps.

First, we will checkout the Dev2.1 branch as shown below.

$ git checkout Dev2.1

We can now run the following command to stop tracking the remote branch.

$ git branch --unset-upstream

As soon as we execute the command, our Dev2.1 will stop tracking the remote branch. Let's check if this is the case.

We can see that our Dev2.1 branch has no remote-tracking branch.

请注意, when you stop tracking a remote branch, you will no longer be able to push changes made in your local repository to the remote branch.

Other options

Alternatively, you can delete the remote-tracking branches in your local repository. This doesn't work for everyone.

This is a quick solution for those who no longer need branches.

$ git branch -d -r origin/<remote branch name>

Replace the remote branch name with the name of the tracking branch. This command does not delete the branch in the remote repository.

It only unsets the branch used to track the remote.

Another way to handle this is to edit the configuration file to remove the link between the local and remote branches.

Run the command below.

$ git config --unset branch.<local-branch-name>.remote
$ git config --unset branch.<local-branch-name>.merge

This will edit the configuration to remove the association between the remote and local branches.

In short, we have covered three methods that can be used to stop tracking a remote branch. git branch --unset-upstreamThe command is the cleanest and simplest.

You can also remove the link between two branches by editing the Git configuration file.