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 the Git 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

Use:

git remote prune <remote>

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

Example: git remote prune origin

Answer 5

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