How to quickly remove merged branches

Issue

The number of merged, non-removed branches in our repository grew significantly. The time to cleanup has come. How to make it quickly?

Doing a hundred “click-delete-and-confirm” manual sequences in Web UI is a bad idea, let’s find a better one.

Solution

Notice: pay attention to the name of your remote and change it if needed.

1. Fetch all changes from the repository, cleaning up stale remote references at the same time.

   git fetch -p

2. Checkout the branch you consider “if it’s merged to this branch, it can be removed”. For us, it was develop. Update your local repository with most recent changes.

   git checkout develop
   git merge --ff-only origin/develop

3. Create a list of branches to be removed, filtering out all release branches, master and develop. Dump it to a file.

   git branch -r --merged \
     | grep -v '\*\|master\|release\|develop' \
     | sed 's/origin\///' > merged_branches.txt

4. Check the candidates in merged_branches.txt if they’re all safe to be removed.

5. Remove ‘em!

   cat merged_branches.txt | xargs -n 1 git push --delete origin

That’s all, hope that helps!