Magit equivalent of `git branch -D -r origin/feature/someLabelHere`

Question

On the command-line, I often do this

git branch -D -r origin/feature/someLabelHere

to remove a remote branch after a pull request from that branch has been merged into master. I know now to do

git branch -d feature/someLabelHere

in magit, but not the -D -r equivalent. How can one?

Simply pressing k to ask for removal on the displayed remote branch gets an error message and reference to the process buffer where one sees e.g.

  1 git … push origin :bugfix/someLabelHere        
error: unable to delete 'bugfix/someLabelHere': remote ref does not exist  
error: failed to push some refs to '[email protected]:eddelbuettel/somerepo.git'    

Edit: It may have been an 'order of commands' issue. Deleting in magit before removing the remote branch at github seems to do the trick.

Answer 1

Edit: The below description is of course still accurate, but it should be noted that Magit now falls back to deleting just the local remote-tracking ref if the respective branch does not actually exist on the remote anymore.

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Pulling out the relevant information from the question comments:

Magit does not provide a direct equivalent of git branch -D -r <remote>/<branch>. The --prune flag from the fetch popup (by default, f-p) can be used instead to delete all stale remote-tracking for a particular remote.

I believe that Magit doesn't provide a command for git branch -D -r because it is the assumed that it would be rare for a user to want to delete a single stale remote-tracking branch but not prune other stale remote-tracking branches for that remote.

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If the branch does still exist on a remote, k will run git push <remote> :<branch>, deleting the branch on the remote and cleaning up the local remote-tracking branch. So, provided that the branch hasn't been deleted from the remote in some other way (e.g., through GitHub's web interface or by running git push <remote> :<branch> from another machine), this command is all you need to run (at least until you get on another machine and want to prune the remote-tracking branches there).

Unlike git push <remote> :<branch>, git branch -D -r <remote>/<branch> is not sufficient to delete the branch on the remote. This is described in man git-branch:

Use -r together with -d to delete remote-tracking branches. Note, that it only makes
sense to delete remote-tracking branches if they no longer exist in the remote
repository or if git fetch was configured not to fetch them again. See also the prune
subcommand of git-remote(1) for a way to clean up all obsolete
remote-tracking branches.

The example below shows what the above quote is talking about. If you just use git branch -D -r, the local remote-tracking branch will deleted just to be recreated on the next fetch.

set -x

# Repo setup

mkdir remote-repo
cd remote-repo
git init --bare

cd ..
mkdir local-repo
cd local-repo

git init
echo text > some-file
git add some-file
git commit -m"Add some file"
git checkout -b feat master
echo text > feat-file
git add feat-file
git commit -m"Add feature file"
git remote add origin ../remote-repo
git push origin feat master

# branch -D -r test

git branch -D -r origin/feat
ls .git/refs/remotes/origin/

git fetch origin
ls .git/refs/remotes/origin/

But a git push origin :feat (or, in Magit, k and then selecting origin/feat) will get rid of the branch in both places.

git push origin :feat
ls .git/refs/remotes/origin/

git fetch origin
ls .git/refs/remotes/origin/