git-sweep

A command-line tool that helps you clean up Git branches that have been merged into master.

One of the best features of Git is cheap branches. There are existing branching models like GitHub Flow and Vincent Driessen's git-flow that describe methods for using this feature.

The problem

Your master branch is typically where all your code lands. All features branches are meant to be short-lived and merged into master once they are completed.

As time marches on, you can build up a long list of branches that are no longer needed. They've been merged into master, what do we do with them now?

The answer

Using git-sweep you can safely remove remote branches that have been merged into master.

To install it run:

pip install git-sweep || easy_install git-sweep

Try it for yourself (safely)

To see a list of branches that git-sweep detects are merged into your master branch:

You need to have your Git repository as your current working directory.

$ cd myrepo

The preview command doesn't make any changes to your repo.

$ git-sweep preview
Fetching from the remote
These branches have been merged into master:

  branch1
  branch2
  branch3
  branch4
  branch5

To delete them, run again with `git-sweep cleanup`

If you are happy with the list, you can run the command that deletes these branches from the remote, cleanup:

$ git-sweep cleanup
Fetching from the remote
These branches have been merged into master:

  branch1
  branch2
  branch3
  branch4
  branch5

Delete these branches? (y/n) y
  deleting branch1 (done)
  deleting branch2 (done)
  deleting branch3 (done)
  deleting branch4 (done)
  deleting branch5 (done)

All done!

Tell everyone to run `git fetch --prune` to sync with this remote.
(you don't have to, yours is synced)

Note: this can take a little time, it's talking over the tubes to the remote.

You can also give it a different name for your remote and master branches.

$ git-sweep preview --master=develop --origin=github
...

Tell it to skip the git fetch that it does by default.

$ git-sweep preview --nofetch
These branches have been merged into master:

  branch1

To delete them, run again with `git-sweep cleanup --nofetch`

Make it skip certain branches.

$ git-sweep preview --skip=develop
Fetching from the remote
These branches have been merged into master:

  important-upgrade
  upgrade-libs
  derp-removal

To delete them, run again with `git-sweep cleanup --skip=develop`

Once git-sweep finds the branches, you'll be asked to confirm that you wish to delete them.

Delete these branches? (y/n)

You can use the --force option to bypass this and start deleting immediately.

$ git-sweep cleanup --skip=develop --force
Fetching from the remote
These branches have been merged into master:

  important-upgrade
  upgrade-libs
  derp-removal

  deleting important-upgrade (done)
  deleting upgrade-libs (done)
  deleting derp-removal (done)

All done!

Tell everyone to run `git fetch --prune` to sync with this remote.
(you don't have to, yours is synced)

Deleting local branches

You can also clean up local branches by using simple hack:

$ cd myrepo
$ git remote add local $(pwd)
$ git-sweep cleanup --origin=local

Development

git-sweep uses git-flow for development and release cylces. If you want to hack on this with us, fork the project and put a pull request into the develop branch when you get done.

To run the tests, bootstrap Buildout and run this command:

$ git clone http://github.com/arc90/git-sweep.git
$ cd git-sweep
$ python2.7 bootstrap.py
...
$ ./bin/buildout
...
$ ./bin/test

We also use Tox. It will run the tests for Python 2.6 and 2.7.

$ ./bin/tox

Requirements

• Git >= 1.7
• Python >= 2.6

License

Friendly neighborhood MIT license.