Cleaning up stale Git branches

It’s easy to forget to delete branches once they’ve been merged back to develop, and over time you can end up with many unused branches cluttering up your git repo.

This command can be helpful to review which branches need deleting. It produces a list of [author] - [last commit date] - [branch name].

git for-each-ref --sort=committerdate --sort=committername refs/remotes/ \
--format='%(committername) - %(committerdate:short) - %(refname:short)'

Alternatively, to produce a CSV file of all branches:

git for-each-ref --sort=committerdate --sort=committername refs/remotes/ \
--format='%(committername),%(committerdate:short),%(refname:short)' > branches.csv

Here’s a shell command that will find branches with commits not from this year (2020) and delete them

git for-each-ref refs/remotes/ --format='%(committerdate:short) %(refname:short)' \
| grep -v '^2020-' \
| grep -v -E 'origin/(master|develop)$' \
| cut -d' ' -f2 \
| sed 's/origin\///' \
| xargs git push origin --delete

Taking this line by line:

1. List all branches, and the date of their last commit as [date] [branch]

2. Filter out any branches with commits in the year 2020

3. Make sure to exclude the master and develop branches, in case this repo is stale (wouldn’t want to delete those! Also, you should have them setup as protected branches in Github)

4. Split on the space character, and output the second field (the branch names)

5. Remove origin/ from the branch names

6. Delete the branches