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
    7 Essential JavaScript Functions

    I remember the early days of JavaScript where you needed a simple function for just about everything because the browser vendors implemented features differently, and not just edge features, basic features, like addEventListener and attachEvent.  Times have changed but there are still a few functions each developer should...

  • By
    5 More HTML5 APIs You Didn’t Know Existed

    The HTML5 revolution has provided us some awesome JavaScript and HTML APIs.  Some are APIs we knew we've needed for years, others are cutting edge mobile and desktop helpers.  Regardless of API strength or purpose, anything to help us better do our job is a...

Incredible Demos

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!