780

Let's say I had a branch named coolbranch in my repository.

Now, I decided to delete it (both remotely and locally) with:

git push origin :coolbranch
git branch -D coolbranch

Great! Now the branch is really deleted.

But when I run

git branch -a

I still get:

remotes/origin/coolbranch

Something to notice, is that when I clone a new repository, everything is fine and git branch -a doesn't show the branch.

I want to know - is there a way to delete the branch from the branch -a list without cloning a new instance?

Peter Mortensen
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yonix
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    Related: [Delete a Git branch both locally and remotely](http://stackoverflow.com/q/2003505/456814). –  Oct 18 '15 at 01:32
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    If you `git fetch -p` (or `git pull -p`) then remote branches will be pruned. – yoyo Jul 07 '16 at 22:07

6 Answers6

941

git remote prune origin will remove all such stale branches. That's probably what you'd want in most cases, but if you want to just remove that particular remote-tracking branch, you should do:

git branch -d -r origin/coolbranch

(The -r is easy to forget...)

-r in this case will "List or delete (if used with -d) the remote-tracking branches." according to the Git documentation found here: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-branch

Boris Verkhovskiy
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Mark Longair
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    `git remote prune origin` or any form of `git fetch --prune` flagging did not work for me in my case. ...But `git branch -d -r origin/feature/branch-name` did work. I'm not sure if it had something to do with it being under the `feature` namespace (git flow) but that's how it went down, in case any googlers find that happens to them. – Misterparker Jul 09 '16 at 05:34
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    Is there a reason this is necessary? Seems really bad to leave these non-existent branch names in the list and not automatically prune them. – akronymn Feb 27 '17 at 20:20
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    @akronymn Agreed. There's a lot of odd default behavior in git – Kellen Stuart Feb 17 '22 at 18:42
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    @akronymn there is a config flag you can set to do it automatically : set `fetch.prune` to `true` (cf [this answer](https://stackoverflow.com/a/59792628/11384184)) – Lenormju Jul 07 '22 at 14:07
  • git branch -d -r origin/sprint#12A works for me – Gopal Kohli May 19 '23 at 08:14
395

Try:

git remote prune origin

From the Git remote documentation:

prune

Deletes all stale remote-tracking branches under <name>. These stale branches have already been removed from the remote repository referenced by <name>, but are still locally available in "remotes/<name>".

With --dry-run option, report what branches will be pruned, but do not actually prune them.

Peter Mortensen
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Brian Phillips
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280

Don't forget the awesome

git fetch -p

which fetches and prunes all origins.

orip
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36

In our particular case, we use Stash as our remote Git repository. We tried all the previous answers and nothing was working. We ended up having to do the following:

git branch –D branch-name (delete from local)
git push origin :branch-name (delete from remote)

Then when users went to pull changes, they needed to do the following:

git fetch -p
Peter Mortensen
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Shadowvail
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  • `git branch -d branch-name` worked for me. Notice `-D` to `-d`. In fact when I tried with upper case D `-D` it created a new branch with name -D – RP- Aug 24 '16 at 21:32
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    the "-D" is a way of forcing the delete regardless of its push or merge status. Obviously be careful using it, but in a lot of cases, it has been necessary. – Shadowvail Apr 16 '19 at 12:57
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    What does the `:` stand for in `git push origin :branch-name`? – Giraldi Dec 08 '21 at 08:49
  • @Giraldi `:` stands for _fromLocalBranch_ : _toRemoteBranch_. Efectively, pushing _empty_ to remote branch. – jesusduarte Jul 14 '22 at 01:15
32

Use:

git remote prune <remote>

Where <remote> is a remote source name like origin or upstream.

Example: git remote prune origin

Peter Mortensen
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likaiguo.happy
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    for future readers, here's the difference between [`git remote prune`, `git prune`, `git fetch --prune`](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20106712/what-are-the-differences-between-git-remote-prune-git-prune-git-fetch-prune). – Emile Bergeron Mar 30 '16 at 01:44
7

I've been using

git fetch -p && git branch -vv | awk '/: gone]/{print $1}' | xargs git branch -D

to delete the local branches pointing to merged branches.

Guilherme Vieira
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