Is there a better way to find out if a local git branch exists?

When I search for 'git check if branch exists' on a search engine, this page is the first one I see.

I get what I want, but I'd like to provide a updated answer since the original post was from 2011.

git rev-parse --verify <branch_name>

This is essentially the same as the accepted answer, but you don't need type in "refs/heads/"

As far as I know, that's the best way to do it in a script. I'm not sure there's much more to add to that, but there might as well be one answer that just says "That command does everything you want" :)

The only thing you might want to be careful of is that branch names can have surprising characters in them, so you may want to quote <branch-name>.