Shiveen Pandita

Fix Git Branch Prefix Uppercasing

Context #

Sometimes git gets confused and uppercases the branch names. This happened to me today while I was working on a bug and on git checkout issue/* prefix kept getting renamed to ISSUE/* and this usually breaks the auto build mechanism at work for me, since we have it configured to look for a particular regex. This is not a particularly complex or even a unique problem, but I encounter it so infrequently (second time now), that I thought its worth just writing about even if for my own reference.

How to fix #

First step is to fix the refs. This is taken from this thread:

cd .git/refs/heads
mv ISSUE issue

the command above should fix the issue ref (folder) name so new issues don’t have the uppercased prefix.

Now, we tackle existing branches. If a branch has been created but not pushed do:

git branch -m <old_name> <new_name>

My git complained that there was already a branch with an existing name when all i did was change the branch name from ISSUE/existing-branch-name to issue/existing-branch-name so I renamed it as issue/existing-branch-name-2 (same name but with a prefix).

however, if a branch has been pushed, after the previous step do the following:

git push origin -d <old_name>
git push origin <new_name>

this will fix up any broken branch names already pushed, whilst preserving the changes.

That should fix it up nicely ✅