holocron/plugins/gitea/skills/gitea-branches/references/branches.md

topic, source_keys

topic	source_keys
branches	gitea-mcp-repo gitea-mcp-slim-go

Branch operations

Call signatures below were verified live against the deployed gitea-mcp server via ToolSearch, not copied from research docs — this is deliberate: research docs are generated from source code at a point in time and can drift from the server actually deployed. Last verified against gitea-mcp v1.7.0, as reported by get_gitea_mcp_server_version. Re-verify against the live schema if the deployed version differs or these tools behave differently than documented here.

list_branches

Parameters:

• owner (string, required)
• repo (string, required)
• page (number, optional, default: 1)
• per_page (number, optional, default: 30)

Call:

list_branches owner: <owner> repo: <repo>

Response: one object per branch: name, protected (bool), commit_sha (present when the underlying commit data is available).

Paginate if you need the full list (see Gotchas in SKILL.md) — iterate page until the returned count is less than per_page.

create_branch

Parameters:

• owner (string, required)
• repo (string, required)
• branch (string, required) — new branch name
• old_branch (string, optional) — source branch; if omitted, defaults to the repo's default branch server-side (not necessarily your current local checkout)

Call:

create_branch owner: <owner> repo: <repo> branch: <new-name> old_branch: <source-branch>

Default dispatch: if the user gives a base ("branch off of X", "from X"), pass it as old_branch. If they don't specify a base and you're mid-task on a local branch, pass your current branch (rtk git branch --show-current) as old_branch so the new branch forks from where you're actually working, rather than silently falling back to the repo default. If neither applies (e.g. a fresh top-level request with no working branch context), omit old_branch and let it default server-side.

A branch name collision returns 409 Conflict.

rename_branch

Parameters:

• owner (string, required)
• repo (string, required)
• branch (string, required) — the branch's current name
• new_name (string, required) — the name to move it to

Call:

rename_branch owner: <owner> repo: <repo> branch: <current-name> new_name: <new-name>

A rename moves the ref server-side; it is not a delete-plus-create, and no commit history is rewritten. What it does to things pointing at the old name — open pull requests using it as head or base, a branch protection rule matching it, CI config, and tracking branches on every other clone — is not confirmed by this skill's sources: the deployed tool describes itself only as "Rename an existing branch in a repository". Treat a rename of a branch with open PRs or a protection rule as a change needing verification afterward (list_branches, plus gitea-prs for the PR side), and confirm with the user first, exactly as for delete_branch below. A collision with an existing branch name is expected to return 409 Conflict by analogy with create_branch, not separately confirmed.

delete_branch

Parameters:

• owner (string, required)
• repo (string, required)
• branch (string, required)

Call:

delete_branch owner: <owner> repo: <repo> branch: <name>

Before calling this, see the delete_branch Gotcha in SKILL.md. If the target branch's name isn't obviously a scratch/feature branch, call list_branches first and check protected on the matching entry — name-matching main/master alone isn't authoritative, since a repo can protect a differently-named default branch. Confirm explicitly with the user before deleting anything protected, every time, regardless of how the request is phrased.

Token scope

list_branches, create_branch and delete_branch all require write:repository. Gitea gates reads behind write scope for repo-scoped operations, so list_branches needs the same scope as the write operations, not write:issue alone. An earlier version of this doc claimed write:issue alone was sufficient for list_branches, based on empirical testing under a token that held both write:issue and write:repository simultaneously — that test didn't isolate the variable, so it couldn't actually establish write:issue alone as sufficient.

rename_branch is a write on the same repo-scoped surface and is inferred to need write:repository too — inferred by analogy, not separately confirmed.