remove branches not on remote

Question

==> git branch -a
* master
  test
  remotes/origin/master
  remotes/origin/test

when someone delete the remotes/origin/test,I still can see it on my computer.

I know I can do this and remove the test

==> git remote prune
==> git branch -d test
==> git branch -a
* master
  remotes/origin/master

But if I have more local branch, and they are not on remote, so how can I remove them quickly?

Answer 1

This is how I remove local branches that are not longer relevant:

git branch --merged origin/master | xargs git branch -d

You may need to tweak it according to your specific configuration (e.g. see comments below to exclude particular branches), but the first command here before the pipe should give you a list of all your local branches that have been merged into your master branch.

Answer 2

According to the git-fetch manual page, git fetch -p will "After fetching, remove any remote-tracking branches which no longer exist on the remote.` If you have local branches tracking those remote branches, you may need to prune those manually.

Answer 3

A simple prune will not delete the local branch.

Here is another approach to achieve a real deletion. Be sure to execute "git fetch -p" first to get the latest status of the remote repositories.

git branch -vv | grep ': gone]'|  grep -v "\*" | awk '{ print $1; }' | xargs -r git branch -d

This will check all local branches and their origin and will delete all local branches whose origin was deleted.

In detail:

git branch -vv

will list your local branches and show information about the remote branch, saying “gone” if it is not present anymore.

grep ': gone]'

will fetch the branches that match the “ gone]” phrase.

grep -v "\*"

will fetch only lines that do not contain an asterisk. This will ignore the branch you are currently on and also prevent that the “git branch -d” is executed with a “*” at the end which would result in deleting all your local branches

awk '{print $1}'

will fetch the output until the first white space, which will result in the local branch name.

xargs git branch -d

will use the output (branch name) and append it to the “git branch -d” command to finally delete the branch. If you also want to delete branches that are not fully merged, you can use a capital “D” instead of “d” to force delete.

Answer 4

I wrote a simple shell script called git-dangling-branches for this purpose. If you specify -D option, it will delete all local branches which don't have refs/remotes/origin/<branch_name>. Of course, you should be careful when you do that.

#!/bin/bash -e
if [[ "$1" == '-D' ]]; then
  DELETE=1
else
  DELETE=0
fi

REMOTE_BRANCHES="`mktemp`"
LOCAL_BRANCHES="`mktemp`"
DANGLING_BRANCHES="`mktemp`"
git for-each-ref --format="%(refname)" refs/remotes/origin/ | \
  sed 's#^refs/remotes/origin/##' > "$REMOTE_BRANCHES"
git for-each-ref --format="%(refname)" refs/heads/ | \
  sed 's#^refs/heads/##' > "$LOCAL_BRANCHES"
grep -vxF -f "$REMOTE_BRANCHES" "$LOCAL_BRANCHES" | \
  sort -V > "$DANGLING_BRANCHES"
rm -f "$REMOTE_BRANCHES" "$LOCAL_BRANCHES"

if [[ $DELETE -ne 0 ]]; then
  cat "$DANGLING_BRANCHES" | while read -r B; do
    git branch -D "$B"
  done
else
  cat "$DANGLING_BRANCHES"
fi
rm -f "$DANGLING_BRANCHES"

Answer 5

I ended up with something very similar to kcm's approach. I wanted something that would purge all local branches that were tracking a remote branch, on origin, where the remote branch has been deleted (gone). I did not want to delete local branches that were never set up to track a remote branch (i.e.: my local dev branches). Also I wanted a simple one-liner that just uses git, or other simple CLI tools, rather than writing custom scripts. I ended up using a bit of grep and awk to make this simple command then added it as a alias in my ~/.gitconfig.

[alias]
  prune-branches = !git remote prune origin && git branch -vv | grep ': gone]' | awk '{print $1}' | xargs -r git branch -D

Here is a git config --global ... command for easily adding this as git prune-branches:

git config --global alias.prune-branches '!git remote prune origin && git branch -vv | grep '"'"': gone]'"'"' | awk '"'"'{print $1}'"'"' | xargs -r git branch -d'

NOTE: As Matteo pointed out in his earlier comment on another answer, use of the -D flag to git branch can be very dangerous. So, in the config command I use the -d option to git branch rather than -D; I use -D in my actual config. I use -D because I don't want to hear Git complain about unmerged branches, I just want them to go away. You may want this functionality as well. If so, simply use -D instead of -d at the end of that config command.

Answer 6

You can do this by iterating over the refs, I used following command to remove all the local branches which dont have remote branches and it worked. Warning: this operation does a force delete non fully merged branches, use with care.

git branch -D `git for-each-ref --format="%(fieldName)" refs/heads/<branch-name-pattern>`

%(fieldName) = refname:short)

refs/heads/ = can be suffixed if you have a common prefix/suffix in branch names ex: refs/heads/*abc*

Refer this for more information git-for-each-ref(1) Manual Page

Answer 7

First, do:

git fetch && git remote prune origin

And then:

git branch -a | grep -v ${$(git branch -a | grep remotes | cut -d/" -f3-)/#/-e} | xargs git branch -D

• List all remotes without remote/origin prefix: git branch -a | grep remotes | cut -d'/' -f3-
• Remove all listed from git: git branch -a | grep v ${<all remotes without prefix>/#/-e}
• Remove from local needs -D cause not all have to be marked as merged. For example, squash and merge in Github does not mark them as merged.

Answer 8

Fast

git fetch -p
git branch -v | grep "\[gone\]"

Then manually check and delete branches in the output.

---

Detailed

The simplest manual solution based on the answers in this thread as well as here, is to remove all remote-tracking references that no longer exist on the remote with

git fetch -p

then see what has been removed from remote-tracking, but is still in your local working tree with

git branch -v

and manually delete branches that have [gone] in the output.

To get a concise list run

git branch -v | grep "\[gone\]"