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

  • By
    Create a CSS Flipping Animation

    CSS animations are a lot of fun; the beauty of them is that through many simple properties, you can create anything from an elegant fade in to a WTF-Pixar-would-be-proud effect. One CSS effect somewhere in between is the CSS flip effect, whereby there's...

  • 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...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Morphing Elements Using MooTools and CSS

    Morphing an element between CSS classes is another great trick the MooTools JavaScript library enables you to do. Morphing isn't the most practical use of MooTools, but it's still a trick at your disposal. Step 1: The XHTML The block of content that will change is...

  • By
    Introducing LazyLoad 2.0

    While improvements in browsers means more cool APIs for us to play with, it also means we need to maintain existing code.  With Firefox 4's release came news that my MooTools LazyLoad plugin was not intercepting image loading -- the images were loading regardless of...

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!