How to remove old Git branches

It's common to need to remove old git branches. It's almost a day to day task that the most of developers do.

To The Point

Before you start removing your branches you should checkout to master with :

git checkout origin/master

Removing a local branch

git branch -D name-of-branch

Removing a branch on remote

BEAWARE This will make a request to git server to remove branch on remote! 

git push origin :name-of-branch-to-remove-on-git-server

Removing local branches stale on remote

With fetching

git fetch -p

Only removing

git remote origin prune

Snippets 

git fetch -p

git remote origin prune

BONUS

After some digging I've found there is a better git-command that can be used to prune - and it's git-prune - unfortunatelly it's available from 2.16.0 version, and as I've found out with :

git --version

I was using a 1.9.1 version :/

Let's change that:

Update git to latest version

sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:git-core/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y git

Now for Ubuntu 14.04 I have a 2.16.2 version.

Acknowledgements

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See you in the next episode! Cheers!

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