Cleaning Orphan Remote Branches with git fetch --prune

Thu, 25 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0900

In modern development workflows using GitHub or GitLab, feature branches are typically deleted on the remote host as soon as their corresponding pull request (PR) is merged.

However, when you run git branch -a in your local terminal, you will notice that the references pointing to those deleted remote branches (e.g., remotes/origin/feature-xxx) remain in your branch list indefinitely.

This occurs because Git does not automatically sync deletions from remote configurations to your local cache by default.

Cleanup on Commentary of Takao

Cleaning Orphan Remote Branches with git fetch --prune