How to prune local git tags that don't exist on remote

As of git 1.9.4, it appears that there is no easy way to remove local tags that don’t exist on remote (a.k.a “stale tags”). According to --prune option in git fetch documentaiton :

Tags are not subject to pruning if they are fetched only because of the default tag auto-following or due to a --tags option. However, if tags are fetched due to an explicit refspec (either on the command line or in the remote configuration, for example if the remote was cloned with the --mirror option), then they are also subject to pruning..

To put it simple, if you are trying to do something like git fetch -p -t, it will not work starting with git version 1.9.4.

However, there is a simple workaround that still works in latest versions:

  $ git tag -l | xargs git tag -d # remove all local tags
  $ git fetch -t                  # fetch remote tags

A one liner can be written as:

  $ git tag -l | xargs git tag -d && git fetch -t

Alternative, you can add a new alias to your ~/.gitconfig file to make things shorter:

# in ~/.gitconfig
[alias]
    ... ... ... # your existing aliases
    pt = !git tag -l | xargs git tag -d && git fetch -t

Now, you can simply call pt alias to prune local stale tags:

  $ git pt

Follow @demisx1 for more tips and best practices.

Today my environment was:

• Git 1.2.1
• Mac OS X 10.10