Moving Between Branches and Deleting Them

Creating and Switching to a New Branch

As we have already mentioned in the previous chapter, to switch to a particular branch, you can use the git checkout command. However, creating a branch and switching to a newly created branch is extremely common, hence why Git introduced a separate command for creating a new branch and immediately switching to it.

Basically, we should run the same git checkout command, but with the -b flag:

Deleting Branches

To delete a branch, use the -d flag (which stands for delete). This deletes the branch only if its changes are already merged into the current branch:

Where <branch_name> is the name of the branch you want to delete.

Note

If there are unmerged changes, Git will prevent the deletion and provide a warning.

Everything will become clear with an example.

Example Workflow

Let’s first check the status of our working tree and staging area:

As you can see, our working tree and staging area are empty, and we are currently on the testing/some-tests branch. We can now create a new branch named feature/new-feature, immediately switch to it and then list all branches:

The HEAD now points to our new branch, so let’s display the two latest commits:

Our new branch and the testing/some-tests branch point to the same latest commit, and since we are now on the new branch, we can safely delete the testing/some-tests branch:

The deletion was successful, let’s now once again take a look at the two latest commits and list all branches:

The branch was indeed deleted since we only have two branches now with the new one pointing to the latest commit, and the master branch being one commit behind.