Cleaning up old remote git branches

Question

I work from two different computers  A and B  and store a common git remote in the dropbox directory   Let s say I have two branches  master and devel  Both are tracking their remote counterparts origin master and origin devel   Now while on computer A  I delete branch devel  on local and remote   git push origin  heads devel git branch -d devel   Running git branch -a on computer A  I get the following list of branches    master origin HEAD origin master   Running git fetch on computer B  I can remove the local devel branch with git branch -d devel  but I can t remove the remote devel branch   git push origin  heads devel returns the following error messages      error  unable to push to unqualified destination  heads proxy3d   The destination refspec neither matches an existing ref on the remote nor begins with refs   and we are unable to guess a prefix based on the source ref    fatal  The remote end hung up unexpectedly   git branch -a still lists origin devel in the remote branches   How can I clean up the remote branches from computer B

User · Answer

First use prune --dry-run to filter delete the local branches git remote prune origin --dry-run       grep origin        sed  s   origin   g        xargs git branch -D    Second delete the remote refs without --dry-run git remote prune origin   Prune the same branches from local- and remote-refs in my example from origin

User · Answer

I ll have to add an answer here  because the other answers are either not covering my case or are needlessly complicated  I use github with other developers and I just want all the local branches whose remotes were  possibly merged and  deleted from a github PR to be deleted in one go from my machine  No  things like git branch -r --merged don t cover the branches that were not merged locally  or the ones that were not merged at all  abandoned  etc  so a different solution is needed  Anyway  the first step I got it from other answers  git fetch --prune  A dry run of git remote prune origin seemed like it would do the same thing in my case  so I went with the shortest version to keep it simple  Now  a git branch -v should mark the branches whose remotes are deleted as  gone   Therefore  all I need to do is  git branch -v grep    gone    awk   print  1   xargs -I   git branch -D     As simple as that  it deletes everything I want for the above scenario  The less common xargs syntax is so that it also works on Mac  amp  BSD in addition to Linux  Careful  this command is not a dry run so it will force-delete all the branches marked as  gone   Obviously  this being git nothing is gone forever  if you see branches deleted that you remember you wanted kept you can always undelete them  the above command will have listed their hash on deletion  so a simple git checkout -b  lt branch gt   lt hash gt   Edit  Just add this alias to your  bashrc  bash profile  the two commands made into one and I updated the second to work on all shells  alias old branch delete  git fetch -p  amp  amp  git branch -vv   awk  quot    gone   print   1  quot    xargs git branch -D

User · Answer

Here is how to do it with SourceTree  v2 3 1    1  Click Fetch  2  Check  Prune tracking branches       3  Press OK  4

User · Answer

Consider to run    git fetch --prune   On a regular basis in each repo to remove local branches that have been tracking a remote branch that is deleted  no longer exists in remote GIT repo    This can be further simplified by  git config remote origin prune true   this is a per-repo setting that will make any future git fetch or git pull to automatically prune   To set this up for your user  you may also edit the global  gitconfig and add   fetch      prune   true   However  it s recommended that this is done using the following command   git config --global fetch prune true   or to apply it system wide  not just for the user   git config --system fetch prune true

User · Answer

This command will  dry run  delete all remote  origin  merged branches  apart from master  You can change that  or  add additional branches after master  grep -v for-example-your-branch-here    git branch -r --merged      grep origin      grep -v   gt        grep -v master      xargs -L1      awk   sub  origin        print       xargs git push origin --delete --dry-run   If it looks good  remove the --dry-run  Additionally  you may like to test this on a fork first

User · Answer

First  what is the result of git branch -a on machine B   Second  you have already deleted heads devel on origin  so that s why you can t delete it from machine B   Try  git branch -r -d origin devel   or  git remote prune origin   or  git fetch origin --prune   and feel free to add --dry-run to the end of your git statement to see the result of running it without actually running it   Docs for git remote prune and git branch

User · Answer

If git branch -r shows a lot of remote-tracking branches that you re not interested in and you want to remove them only from local  use the following command   git branch -r   grep -Ev  HEAD master develop     xargs -r git branch -rd   A safer version would be to only remove the merged ones   git branch -r --merged   grep -Ev  HEAD master develop     xargs -r git branch -rd   This might be useful for large projects  where you don t need the feature branches of other teammates but there re lots of remote-tracking branches fetched upon the initial clone   However  this step alone is not sufficient  because those deleted remote-tracking branches would come back upon next git fetch   To stop fetching those remote-tracking branches you need to explicitly specify the refs to fetch in  git config    remote  origin       fetch    refs heads   refs remotes origin          don t fetch everything   fetch    refs heads master refs remotes origin master   fetch    refs heads develop refs remotes origin develop   fetch    refs heads release   refs remotes origin release     In the above example we only fetch master  develop and release branches  feel free to adapt as you need

User · Answer

Deletion is always a challenging task and can be dangerous    Therefore  first execute the following command to see what will happen   git push --all --prune --dry-run   By doing so like the above  git will provide you with a list of what would happen if the below command is executed   Then run the following command to remove all branches from the remote repo that are not in your local repo   git push --all --prune

User · Answer

Here is bash script that can do it for you  It s modified version of http   snippets freerobby com post 491644841 remove-merged-branches-in-git script  My modification enables it to support different remote locations      bin bash  current branch   git branch --no-color 2 gt   dev null   sed -e         d  -e  s           1    if     current branch      master     then   echo  WARNING  You are on branch  current branch  NOT master   fi echo -e  Fetching merged branches    n   git remote update --prune remote branches   git branch -r --merged   grep -v   master     grep -v    current branch    local branches   git branch --merged   grep -v  master     grep -v   current branch    if   -z   remote branches     amp  amp    -z   local branches     then   echo  No existing branches have been merged into  current branch   else   echo  This will remove the following branches     if   -n   remote branches     then echo   remote branches    fi   if   -n   local branches     then echo   local branches    fi   read -p  Continue   y n     -n 1 choice   echo   if     choice      y           choice      Y     then     remotes  echo   remote branches    sed  s                 1 g    sort -u    Remove remote branches for remote in  remotes do         branches  echo   remote branches    grep   remote     sed  s                  2  g    tr -d   n           git push  remote  branches  done    Remove local branches git branch -d  git branch --merged   grep -v  master     grep -v   current branch     sed  s origin    g    tr -d   n     else echo  No branches removed     fi fi

[git] Cleaning up old remote git branches

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