Day 7 - Trim your branches

dorothy · November 18, 2022, 5:57pm

Congrats on reaching the end of week one!

It’s Friday, so let’s end with a quick win:

Run git branch -r . Marvel at all the old tracking branches that have been left in your local repo.
Run git remote prune origin to delete the local tracking branches that don’t exist on origin anymore. You might want to throw a --dry-run on there to confirm that git is going to do the right thing.
Re-run git branch -r . Better, right?
Now that your local repo is clean, take a look at the branches on origin by running git ls-remote --heads origin .
Delete any of your branches that are no longer needed with git push origin --delete old_branch .
Maybe bug your coworkers to do 4 and 5, too.
Enjoy the weekend!

lud · January 9, 2023, 7:38am

Easy win, I clean up all my branches after every remote merge of a PR

From my bash profile (should still work, I’m not maintaining this repo anymore since I moved it to a private one because I added shortcuts for non-public projects):

github.com

swiknaba/.bashrc.d/blob/main/src/git.bashrc#L32-L51


      
          function git_clean1() {
            git fetch -p
            git branch -vv | awk '/: gone]/{print $1}' | xargs git branch -D
          }
          
          
function git_clean2() {
            git fetch -p
            for branch in $(git branch -vv | grep ': gone]' | awk '{print $1}')
            do
              if [[ -n "$branch" ]]
              then
                git branch -D "$branch"
              fi
            done
          }
          
          
function git_clean_tags() {
            git tag -l | xargs git tag -d
            git fetch --tags
          }

Warning: I’m far away from being a bash or git expert! There is a better way for sure

rstankov · January 9, 2023, 1:22pm

I have a git cleanup command that does this.

github.com

RStankov/config_files/blob/master/bin/git-cleanup

#!/bin/bash
git checkout master
git delete-merged
git remote prune origin
git prune
git clean -df
git gc

git gc is also an useful thing todo when pruning.

edgibbs · January 9, 2023, 2:35pm

Easy since we use Gerrit and hence no common Git patterns with branches, but did manage to delete one remote. (And not a fan of Gerrit)

AndrewP · January 9, 2023, 3:12pm

Done. I generally delete branches after they’ve been merged into main, but there are still a lot of extra ones hanging out there. I got rid of a couple dozen or so.

nicoespeon · January 9, 2023, 7:25pm

That was an easy win since we usually clean them up as we go. If you are using GitHub, I recommend you turn this option in settings:

You can also find out stale branches on https://github.com/<owner>/<repo>/branches/stale. It’s a nice way to pop discussions around old branches that may be POC that never got shipped.

ciacci1234 · January 11, 2023, 2:42pm

Got to this one I had a bunch of stale branches pushed up that had some experimental changes that I wanted CI to chew through

Topic		Replies	Views
Day 5 - Trim your branches Exercises	28	2316	January 28, 2021
Day 5 - Trim your branches	56	849	November 18, 2022
Day 5 - Trim your branches	17	1372	January 28, 2021
Day 17 - Tidy your PRs/Issues	20	388	November 18, 2022
Day 2 - Nuke TODO comments	109	1276	November 18, 2022

Day 7 - Trim your branches

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