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
    How to Create a RetroPie on Raspberry Pi – Graphical Guide

    Today we get to play amazing games on our super powered game consoles, PCs, VR headsets, and even mobile devices.  While I enjoy playing new games these days, I do long for the retro gaming systems I had when I was a kid: the original Nintendo...

  • 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
    MooTools Fun with Fx.Shake

    Adding movement to your website is a great way to attract attention to specific elements that you want users to notice. Of course you could use Flash or an animated GIF to achieve the movement effect but graphics can be difficult to maintain. Enter...

  • By
    Translate Content with the Google Translate API and JavaScript

    Note:  For this tutorial, I'm using version1 of the Google Translate API.  A newer REST-based version is available. In an ideal world, all websites would have a feature that allowed the user to translate a website into their native language (or even more ideally, translation would be...

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!