UPDATE 1 (08/28/2016): One of my cowokrer didn’t satisfy with what I proposed to clean up remote merged branches. Finally, I created 3 git commands to make him happy:

• git-open-merged: display all remote branches which were merged but still open (no RC branches)

• git-old-branches: display all remote branches (both merged and no-merged) which were created long time ago (2 weeks ago, 3 months ago,…I will explain more about this later.)The default value is 2 months ago

• git-delete-branches: delete both local and remote branches from a file. You must supply an input file. If not, the command will do nothing

The idea is after running git open-merged or git old-branches [<sincetime>], we pipe them into a text file, review them manually and then call git delete-branches [filename] to delete those branches both on local and remote server.

To install those customized commands, you have to download those files to /libexec/git-core in your Git folder.

NOTICE: To make sure you have latest infor in your local BEFORE running those commands, run git remote update --prune to clean all stale data.

Recently, my boss asked me to clean up the remote branches which were merged but still open for my company project. It sounds interesting but also scary because I don’t know what will happend if I accidently delete some branches which other developers still work on. Fortunately, I try to Google and find out exactly what I need. I really like post.

In this post, I will try to summarize what I learn from that post because I think I understand more about Git. There are 3 kinds of branches you have to care about:

• Your local branches
• References to remote branches (i.e origin/xyz in your local remote, this is the part I don’t know)
• Remote branches on the server

Local branches

First, display all merged branches:

git branch --merged

Then delete local branches:

git branch -d your-local-branch-name

If you really know what you are doing, you can do

git branch -D your-local-branch-name

References to remote branches

Now where the money is, you usually use git fetch but you miss an important one git fetch -p origin to clean all the stale referencees. A fetch without an option never deletes any branches which already merged in remote repo, it only adds more and more references to your local origin! Adding -p option syncs the list of remote branches.

Remote braches

First, you should do git checkout master git branch -r --merged to showed all merged braches (connected to HEAD) in your local remote (doing git fetch -p origin helps you an accurate list)

Then you can run the following script (only works on a Mac!) to view some infomation before you actually delete a branch

Finally, after reviewing, you can delete a branch you want by

git push origin --delete your-branch-name