Is there a way to rename a branch?

[Rolf Marsh]

I apparently have some branches out of sync; is there a way to rename a branch?

[Mikael Sandberg]

You would need to do the renaming locally in your repository. But before you do that, delete the branch in Bitbucket, do a fetch in your local clone to update it (if doing it from Sourcetree, make sure you check prune tracking branches, from cmd use git fetch -p). Then you can rename the branch and push it back to Bitbucket.

[Gerhard Pretorius]

This might be helpful too.

From: https://www.w3docs.com

[Richie Edwards]

Thanks! Worked perfectly.

[Alexis Evans]

Very helpful article, thanks for the link!

[Tim Razik]

Officially I don't see a way to rename them, but we have had to do that in some cases.  What we do is basically the following

We have branch bugfix/JIRA-1  and want to rename it to bugfix/JIRA-100
All I usually do is take bugfix/JIRA-1 and create a branch off of that called bugfix/JIRA-100
At that point 1 and 100 should be identical.
I can then delete bugfix/JIRA-1.

You could do this via the bitbucket UI or command line as GErhard_Pretorius linked above.  I personally like the UI in this case as it saves me the step of having to push to origin.

[Rick Fleischer]

To summarize the other answers: No, there is no way to rename.  You can copy and delete, to achieve a similar effect.  But if there is, say, a pull request in progress, you can't avoid losing the comments and approvals.

[Paul Mansfield]

this seems to me to be an annoying missing feature of bitbucket!

[Arif Z]

So to summarise:

- git pull (locally cloned, to get latest changes)

- delete remote branch on BitBucket

- git fetch -p

- git branch -m <branch_name>

- git push -u <remote> <branch_name> (push to remote)

or

- create new branch from the branch in BitBucket

- delete the prev branch

[Godspower Ogaga Uti]

while on the current branch: git branch -m "local_branch_name"

[Sudarshan Dhakal]

if you are doing it from visual studio, in team explorer, right click the branch and rename, one issue i had was renaming the branch to lower case (Dev -> dev), in that case i just renamed to dev1 and then to dev. Hope this helps.

[Tim Razik]

Linux and Windows work differently with case sensitivity.  While on linux you can have branch1 and Branch1, that will cause a conflict on windows.  If you are a cross platform shop, you can configure bitbucket to ignore case on branch names. 

https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucketserverkb/case-sensitivity-in-branch-name-causes-issue-816521190.html