Git remote branch deleted, but still it appears in 'branch -a'

Question

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?

Answer 1

git remote prune origin , as suggested in the other answer, 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

Answer 2

Try:

git remote prune origin

From theGit 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.

Answer 3

Don't forget the awesome

git fetch -p

which fetches and prunes all origins.

Answer 4

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

Answer 5

Use:

git remote prune <remote>

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

Example: git remote prune origin

Answer 6

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.