Zombie Branch
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
A zombie branch is a merged branch that's still lying around in your repo, refusing to stay dead. It got merged weeks ago. The PR is closed. But somehow it's still there, showing up in branch lists, confusing future-you.
Real Talk
A zombie branch is a branch that has been merged into main (or abandoned) but was never deleted from the remote. They clutter git branch -r, can confuse CI branch triggers, and occasionally get reused by mistake. GitHub and GitLab both offer auto-delete-on-merge settings to prevent them.
When You'll Hear This
"Enable auto-delete-on-merge so we stop accumulating zombie branches." / "I accidentally pushed to a zombie branch."
Related Terms
Branch Cemetery
A branch cemetery is the graveyard of abandoned feature branches in your repo. Hundreds of them. Nobody knows what's on them. Nobody dares delete them.
Dead Branch
A dead branch is a branch nobody touches anymore. No commits in months, no open PR, no clear purpose. It's just... there. Safe to delete? Probably.
Git
Git is like a magical save system for your code. Every time you save (commit), it remembers exactly what changed.
Zombie PR
A zombie PR is one that's technically still open but the author left the company six months ago, the branch conflicts with everything, and the feature was...