Tip: Remove-BranchesWithUpstreamGone

Wait, I Thought I Deleted That Branch?

One of the things that I found counter-intuitive when I was getting started with Git is that when branches are deleted on the server they are still present in your local repository, even after you have fetched from the server.

We typically delete the source branch when completing a pull request, so this happens a lot. Usually, once the PR has been completed I want to:

1. remove the reference to the deleted remote branch
2. remove the corresponding local branch

Removing Remote Reference

The reference to the remote branch is removed when you run git fetch with the prune switch.

git fetch --prune
Fetching origin
From <remote url>
- [deleted] (none) -> origin/test

Removing Local Branches

Local branches can be removed with the git branch command. Adding -d first checks for unmerged commits and will not delete the branch if there are any commits which are only in the branch that is being deleted. Adding -D overrides the check and deletes the branch anyway.

git branch -d test
Deleted branch test (was <commit hash>)

Remove-BranchesWithUpstreamGone

I’ve added a couple of PowerShell functions to my profile file – which means they are always available in my terminal. If I’m working on an app and I know that some PR’s have been merged I can clean up my workspace running Remove-BranchesWithUpstreamGone in VS Code’s terminal.

As a rule, I don’t need to keep any branches which used to have a copy of the server, but don’t any more (indicated by [gone] in the list of branches). Obviously, local branches which have never been pushed to the server won’t be deleted.

function Remove-BranchesWithUpstreamGone {
  (Get-BranchesWithUpstreamGone) | ForEach-Object {
    Write-Host "Removing branch $_"
    git branch $_ -D
  }
}

function Get-BranchesWithUpstreamGone {
  git fetch --all --prune | Out-Null
  $Branches = git branch -v | Where-Object { $_.Contains('[gone]') }
  $BranchNames += $Branches | ForEach-Object {
    if ($_.Split(' ').Item(1) -ne '') {
      $_.Split(' ').Item(1)
    }
    else {
      $_.Split(' ').Item(2)
    }
  }

  $BranchNames
}