Getting rid of '… does not point to a valid object' for an old git branch

Question

I have a fork of a Git repo and my clone appears to have an issue with an old, no longer existant, branch. I keep seeing this message:

error: refs/heads/t_1140

Answer 1

Your local clone is probably fine, the problem is that the t_1140 branch objects are missing from your GitHub repository.

I had this problem too and GitHub support fixed it, I think by deleting refs/heads/t_1140 on their end.

Update: I got the error again with another branch and I was able to fix it by running this command:

git push origin :refs/heads/t_ispn982_master

You should get a warning message like this:

remote: warning: Allowing deletion of corrupt ref.

but the corrupted branch will be deleted