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Gitting rid of stale branches

Gitting rid of stale branches

Git – Deleting Branches

Consider a local branch foo. The corresponding remote-tracking branch origin/foo (origin is the remote repo) tracks the remote branch Foo. The task of deleting branch foo can be interpreted as the task of deleting all the above three branches. To enumerate :

  1. local branch foo
  2. remote branch Foo
  3. local remote-tracking branch origin/foo

Deleting local branch

The local branch foo can only be deleted if it is fully merged in its upstream branch, or in HEAD if no upstream was set with --track or --set-upstream. The following command accomplishes this :

git branch -d foo

To force deletion if the above requirements are not met :

git branch -D foo

Deleting remote branch

The old, rather obscure syntax for deleting a remote branch is this :

git push origin :Foo

interpreted as deleting the remote branch Foo, because nothing is being pushed to it (git push origin local:remote).
As of Git v1.7.0, remote branches can be deleted using :

git push origin --delete Foo

There’s another way to delete the remote branch Foo,

git push --all --prune origin

This deletes all remote branches that do not exist locally. Since the command is potentially harmful, the --dry-run, -n option can be used initially. Yet more powerful is

git push --mirror origin

which specifies that all refs under refs/ be mirrored to the remote repo origin.

Deleting tracking branch

After deleting the remote branch Foo, all contributors to the repository can run

git remote prune origin     # obsolete

OR

git fetch --prune origin

to remove remote-tracking references that do not exist on the remote.

Alternatively, the tracking branch can be explicitly deleted using

git branch -d -r origin/foo

References

  1. Git Book: Remote Branches
  2. Git Book: Working with Remotes
  3. GitGuys Tut on remotes

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