What are the differences between git remote prune, git prune, git fetch --prune, etc

Question

My situation is this... someone working on the same repo has deleted a branch from his local & remote repo...

Most people who have asked about this kind of problem on Stack Overflow, or other sites have the issue of branches still showing in their remote tracking branch list git branch -a at the bottom:

* master   develop   feature_blah   remotes/origin/master   remotes/origin/develop   remotes/origin/feature_blah   remotes/origin/random_branch_I_want_deleted 

However, in MY situation the branch that shouldn't be there, is local:

* master   develop   feature_blah   random_branch_I_want_deleted   remotes/origin/master   remotes/origin/develop   remotes/origin/feature_blah 

When I do any of the following, it doesn't get removed locally:

$ git prune 

I also tried:

$ git remote prune origin $ git fetch --prune 

More useful info: When I check git remote show origin this is how it looks:

* remote origin Fetch URL: utilities:homeconnections_ui.git Push  URL: utilities:homeconnections_ui.git HEAD branch: master Remote branches:  master                        tracked  develop                       tracked  feature_blah                  tracked  other123                      tracked  other444                      tracked  other999                      tracked Local branches configured for 'git pull':  develop                      merges with remote develop  feature_blah                 merges with remote other999  master                       merges with remote master  random_branch_I_want_deleted merges with remote random_branch_I_want_deleted Local refs configured for 'git push':  develop         pushes to develop     (local out of date)  master          pushes to master      (up to date)  feature_blah    pushes to feature_blah(up to date) 

Notice that it's only in the section titled Local branches configured for 'git pull':

Why?

Answer 1

I don't blame you for getting frustrated about this. The best way to look at is this. There are potentially three versions of every remote branch:

1. The actual branch on the remote repository
   (e.g., remote repo at https://example.com/repo.git, refs/heads/master)
2. Your snapshot of that branch locally (stored under refs/remotes/...)
   (e.g., local repo, refs/remotes/origin/master)
3. And a local branch that might be tracking the remote branch
   (e.g., local repo, refs/heads/master)

Let's start with git prune. This removes objects that are no longer being referenced, it does not remove references. In your case, you have a local branch. That means there's a ref named random_branch_I_want_deleted that refers to some objects that represent the history of that branch. So, by definition, git prune will not remove random_branch_I_want_deleted. Really, git prune is a way to delete data that has accumulated in Git but is not being referenced by anything. In general, it doesn't affect your view of any branches.

git remote prune origin and git fetch --prune both operate on references under refs/remotes/... (I'll refer to these as remote references). It doesn't affect local branches. The git remote version is useful if you only want to remove remote references under a particular remote. Otherwise, the two do exactly the same thing. So, in short, git remote prune and git fetch --prune operate on number 2 above. For example, if you deleted a branch using the git web GUI and don't want it to show up in your local branch list anymore (git branch -r), then this is the command you should use.

To remove a local branch, you should use git branch -d (or -D if it's not merged anywhere). FWIW, there is no git command to automatically remove the local tracking branches if a remote branch disappears.

Answer 2

git remote prune and git fetch --prune do the same thing: deleting the refs to the branches that don't exist on the remote, as you said. The second command connects to the remote and fetches its current branches before pruning.

However it doesn't touch the local branches you have checked out, that you can simply delete with

git branch -d  random_branch_I_want_deleted 

Replace -d by -D if the branch is not merged elsewhere

git prune does something different, it purges unreachable objects, those commits that aren't reachable in any branch or tag, and thus not needed anymore.