Over time, branches accumulate, they get merged, abandoned, or deleted remotely but still present locally.

Short on time? Here’s the TL;DR:

git fetch --prune          # Sync + remove deleted remote branches
git branch -vv             # Find stale branches ([gone])
git branch -d branch_name  # Delete them safely

A Git submodule lets you include another repository inside your own project. This is useful for reusing shared code, libraries, or dependencies across multiple projects.

To add a submodule to your parent repository, follow these steps:

Consider the following scenario. Multiple developers work on one feature branch of a project. Developer A pushes commits into the feature branch, developer B oversees that his local repository is behind origin, force pushes his commits and as a result overwrites the commits from Developer A. Developer A pulls the changes and his commits are now gone. Can Developer’s A missing commits be restored and how?

The scenario described on the title of the article happens pretty often. You committed files, pushed them to a feature branch and created a new pull request to merge them to master. However, maybe you accidentally pushed modified files, for which work is still in progress and you do not want them on master yet. So now you want to remove specific files from the pull request but keep the changes you made in these files locally. How?

A concise reference of my most-used Git commands. Updated on March 2026.