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Delete Merged Branches with git

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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!

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Discussion

  1. Ron Nitzsche

    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.

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