If you work on one project for a long time, you're bound to amass a good number of branches. Deleting these branches locally whenever you're done with them gets annoying, and can cost you a lot of time in branch grooming, or trying to remember 'that command' to delete all merged branches locally.
git-clean looks to remedy that. By running git-clean, you'll delete all
your merged branches quickly and easily.
There are a couple other tools out there like this, but they all fall short for me in some way.
https://github.com/arc90/git-sweep
This tool works great for smaller projects, but if you work on a large project with tens or hundreds of thousands of commits, and thousands of active branches, it stalls out. I've tried several times to get it to work on these larger projects, but I've never been able to. It also has troubles deleting branches locally if they've already been deleted in the remote.
https://github.com/mloughran/git-clean
This tool takes a slightly different approach, it will show you each branch
sequentially and let you decide what to do with it. This might work great for
some people, but I usually end up cleaning out my branches when the output of
git branch becomes unmanagable, so I would rather batch delete all my merged
branches in one go.
https://github.com/dstnbrkr/git-trim
This tool does something reminiscent of interactive rebasing, it will display all of your branches in your text editor, let you choose which ones you want to delete, and deletes them upon saving. My problems with this are: It's a manual process - and, - It doesn't only display merged branches, meaning that you could delete branches that have valuable work on it.
This project is written in Rust, which is really stinkin
fast. It takes about
1.8 seconds to delete 100+ branches, and most of that is network time.
./target/release/git-clean 0.07s user 0.08s system 8% cpu 1.837 total
It deletes your branches in bulk, no stepping through branches or selecting what branches you want gone. It assumes you want to delete all branches that are even with your base branch.
It deletes both local and remote branches, and handles the errors if the remote is already deleted.
There's no possibility of deleting branches with valuable work on them, as it only deletes branches that are even with the base branch you specify (defaults to master).
This tool assumes that you have git installed, and is in your path. If you
don't have it installed, I'm confused as to why you've read this far, but go
here to learn
how to install it.
It also assumes that your git is properly configured to push and pull from
the current repository. git-clean should be run from the directory that
holds the .git directory you care about.
This tool will run the commands git branch, git rev-parse, git remote and
git push on your system. git push will only ever be run as git push origin
--delete 'remote_branch', when deleting remote branches for you. If that isn't
acceptable, use the -l flag to only delete branches locally.
You will need Rust installed to run this tool, so head here to find the appropriate distribution for your machine.
This was developed on rust 1.8.0 stable, so if you're having issues with the compile/install step, make sure your rust version is >= 1.8.0 stable.
With Rust installed, we can now use the Rust package manager, cargo, to
install git-clean:
shell
cargo install git-clean
Be sure to add the installation path to your PATH variable. For me, it's
downloaded to:
/Users/mattcasper/.multirust/toolchains/stable/cargo/bin/git-clean
Verify that it works!: ```shell $ git-clean -h Usage: git-clean [options]
Options: -l, --locals only delete local branches -r, --remotes only delete remote branches -y, --yes skip the check for deleting branches -R REMOTE changes the git remote used (default is origin) -b BRANCH changes the base for merged branches (default is master) -h, --help print this help menu -v, --version print the version
```
If you're updating from an older version of git-clean, just uninstall and then
reinstall:
shell
cargo uninstall git-clean
cargo install git-clean
Lists all the branches to be deleted, and prompts you to confirm:
shell
$ git-clean
The following branches will be deleted locally and remotely:
branch1
branch2
branch3
Continue? (Y/n)
If accepted, it will delete the listed branches both locally and remotely: ```shell Continue? (Y/n) y
Remote: - [deleted] branch1 branch2 was already deleted in the remote.
Local: Deleted branch branch1 (was 3a9ea97). Deleted branch branch2 (was 3a9ea97). Deleted branch branch3 (was 3a9ea97). ``` Branches that are already deleted in the remote are filtered out from the output.
It also offers several options for tweaking what branches get deleted, where.
-l and -r toggle deleting branches only locally or only remotely-R changes the git remote that remote branches are deleted in-b changes the base branch for finding merged branches to deleteAnd other miscellaneous options:
-y overrides the delete branches check. Nice for automating workflows where
you don't want to be prompted.PRs and issues welcome!