Delete Merged Branches with git

By  on  

It's common courtesy to keep your git branch list clean, especially when colleagues need to fetch your remote branches.  I'm a bit of a ... offender, when it comes to maintaining my git branch list.  My colleague John Karahalis is not, however, and he hooked me up with an awesome git alias for deleting branches that have been merged into master. Place the following within your .git/config file:

[alias]
  delete-merged-branches = "!f() { git checkout --quiet master && git branch --merged | grep --invert-match '\\*' | xargs -n 1 git branch --delete; git checkout --quiet @{-1}; }; f"

You can run this command via:

git delete-merged-branches

The script worked masterfully -- all branches merged into master were gone and I was left to evaluate which local branches were left to send pull requests for.  Beautiful.  Keep this around if you're a lazy git-ter like me!

Recent Features

  • By
    39 Shirts – Leaving Mozilla

    In 2001 I had just graduated from a small town high school and headed off to a small town college. I found myself in the quaint computer lab where the substandard computers featured two browsers: Internet Explorer and Mozilla. It was this lab where I fell...

  • By
    Facebook Open Graph META Tags

    It's no secret that Facebook has become a major traffic driver for all types of websites.  Nowadays even large corporations steer consumers toward their Facebook pages instead of the corporate websites directly.  And of course there are Facebook "Like" and "Recommend" widgets on every website.  One...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Create a Download Package Using MooTools Moousture

    Zohaib Sibt-e-Hassan recently released a great mouse gestures library for MooTools called Moousture. Moousture allows you to trigger functionality by moving your mouse in specified custom patterns. Too illustrate Moousture's value, I've created an image download builder using Mooustures and PHP. The XHTML We provide...

  • By
    MooTools, mediaboxAdvanced, and Mexico

    The lightbox is probably one of my favorite parts of the Web 2.0 revolution. No more having to open new windows (which can bog down your computer quite a bit) to see a larger image, video, etc. Instead, the item loads right into the...

Discussion

  1. Nice tip – thanks

  2. Stophe

    Thanks, very handy. Also found this https://gist.github.com/malclocke/943565 to do the same for all merged remote branches.

  3. Tim Smith

    Also note that you can prune remote-tracking references (e.g., remotes/foo/patch-1) with either fetch --prune foo or remote prune foo.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!