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
    Creating Scrolling Parallax Effects with CSS

    Introduction For quite a long time now websites with the so called "parallax" effect have been really popular. In case you have not heard of this effect, it basically includes different layers of images that are moving in different directions or with different speed. This leads to a...

  • By
    Animated 3D Flipping Menu with CSS

    CSS animations aren't just for basic fades or sliding elements anymore -- CSS animations are capable of much more.  I've showed you how you can create an exploding logo (applied with JavaScript, but all animation is CSS), an animated Photo Stack, a sweet...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    CSS Ellipsis Beginning of String

    I was incredibly happy when CSS text-overflow: ellipsis (married with fixed width and overflow: hidden was introduced to the CSS spec and browsers; the feature allowed us to stop trying to marry JavaScript width calculation with string width calculation and truncation.  CSS ellipsis was also very friendly to...

  • By
    Firefox Marketplace Animated Buttons

    The Firefox Marketplace is an incredibly attractive, easy to use hub that promises to make finding and promoting awesome HTML5-powered web applications easy and convenient. While I don't work directly on the Marketplace, I am privy to the codebase (and so...

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!