Pruning remote branches

Often, development in a software project tracked with Git happens on feature branches, and as time goes by, an increasing number of feature branches are merged to the mainline. Usually, these feature branches are deleted in the main repository (origin). However, the branches are not automatically deleted from all the clones while fetching and pulling. Git must explicitly be told to delete the branches from the local repository that have been deleted on origin.

Getting ready

First, we'll set up two repositories and use one of them as a remote for the other. We will use the hello_world_flow_model repository, but first we'll clone a repository to a local bare repository:

$ git clone --bare 
https://github.com/dvaske/hello_world_flow_model.git 
hello_world_flow_model_remote

Next, we'll clone the newly cloned repository to a local one with a working directory:

$ git clone hello_world_flow_model_remote hello_world_flow_model

Now, let's delete a couple of merged feature branches...