deleting-branches.qmd

# Deleting Branches

As described earlier, you should be using short-lived feature branches, which means that you will be deleting branches quite often.
Sometimes, you will end up getting some error messages when you go through the process outlined [here](branching-strategies.qmd#cleaning-up-our-repository).

This page will help you navigate some of the errors you might encounter.

## Fatal Reference

```bash
fatal: couldn't find remote ref refs/heads/branch-name
```

Sometimes you will delete a branch from both the remote and local repositories, but you will get an error message when you later try to pull or push to the remote repository.
For Git to connect local and remote branches, it uses references that are stored in a number of files.
The first place to check is in the ***.git/config*** file.
If you see a reference to the branch you deleted, you can remove it from the file.

```bash
cat .git/config

>   ...
    [branch "old-branch-name"]
            remote = origin
            merge = refs/heads/old-branch-name
    ...
```