git: Delete All Branches but Master

By  on  

Maintenance is incredibly important in any project, but if you want to take your professionalism to the next level, you should keep your git environment in shape.  Unfortunately I'm not that guy -- I leave git branches laying around, even after they've been merged into master.  GitHub even provides a button to do the cleanup but I can't be bothered.  Not good.

When you're ready to do some real cleanup on a repository, throw this at it:

git branch | grep -v "master" | sed 's/^[ *]*//' | sed 's/^/git branch -d /' | bash

The shell command above deletes every branch in your local checkout except for master branch.  This is a dangerous script but you could always check out a given branch from a remote like GitHub if you happen to need it!

Recent Features

Incredible Demos

  • By
    JavaScript Canvas Image Conversion

    At last week's Mozilla WebDev Offsite, we all spent half of the last day hacking on our future Mozilla Marketplace app. One mobile app that recently got a lot of attention was Instagram, which sold to Facebook for the bat shit crazy price of one...

  • By
    Do / Undo Functionality with MooTools

    We all know that do/undo functionality is a God send for word processing apps. I've used those terms so often that I think of JavaScript actions in terms of "do" an "undo." I've put together a proof of concept Do/Undo class with MooTools. The MooTools...

Discussion

  1. The script becomes less dangerous, when it uses the

    git branch -d

    variant instead of the upper case -D. Then branches are only deleted, when they are already merged in any of the remaining branches, and no work is lost. (Also, the error messages show you, which branches have work, that has not yet landed in master.)

  2. git remote prune origin -)

  3. lev
    git branch | grep -v "master" | xargs git branch -d
  4. Allie F

    Thank you, this worked well for me. I first tried it with -d, which deleted some, and then decided to go for -D, which did end up deleting everything but master.

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