With the increasing adoption of source code management workflows such as Git Flow, it is common to keep "stale" branches in local repositories.

Steps to reproduce

The steps needed to end up in this situation are more or less like this:

  • Dev1 creates & publishes the branch Feature1

    git checkout -B Feature1
..make & commit changes..
git push -u origin Feature1

  • Dev2 fetches the branch to collaborate or review

    git fetch
git checkout Feature1

  • Dev2 deletes the Feature1 branch after merging it into master

    # delete the branch on the remote
git push origin --delete Feature1
# delete the branch locally
git branch -D Feature1

Pruning stale references

At this stage, Dev1 (and 3, 4 etc) will want to have the deleted branch gone from their workspace too.

A quick search will lead you to the prune sub command

$> git remote update origin --prune
Fetching origin
From https://github.com/sebastianslutzky/TestRepo
x [deleted]         (none)     -> origin/Feature1

However, this command only removes the reference to the tracking branch, not the local branch itself. You can see that the orphan branch is still here:

$> git branch -l
 Feature1
 * master

Delete branches not in the remote

So here is a simple Powershell script that deletes the orphan local branch:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
 $local=git branch -l
 $remote=git branch -r
 $local|
    %{$_.Trim()}|
    ?{-not ($remote -like '*' + $_) }|
    ?{-not($_ -match "master" )}|
    %{git branch -D $_}

Surely this code could be compressed in one single piped command, but it could turn a bit confusing.

We are getting the list of local and remote branches (lines 1 & 2). Then we perform a substraction set operation ($local - $remote) (line 5). This will gives us the set of local branches not in the remote local branches not in the remote.

We finally delete them in line 7.