Question

How do I delete branches which have already been merged? Can I delete them all at once, instead of deleting each branch one-by-one?

Answer 1

NOTE: You can add other branches to exclude like master and dev if your workflow has those as a possible ancestor. Usually I branch off of a "sprint-start" tag and master, dev and qa are not ancestors.

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First, list locally-tracking branches that were merged in remote (consider using -r flag to list all remote-tracking branches).

git branch --merged

You might see few branches you don’t want to remove. We can add few arguments to skip important branches that we don’t want to delete like master or a develop. The following command will skip master branch and anything that has dev in it.

git branch --merged| grep -Ev "(^\*|master|main|dev)"

If you want to skip, you can add it to the egrep command like the following. The branch skip_branch_name will not be deleted.

git branch --merged| grep -Ev "(^\*|master|main|dev|skip_branch_name)"

To delete all local branches that are already merged into the currently checked out branch:

git branch --merged | grep -Ev "(^\*|master|main|dev)" | xargs git branch -d

You can see that master and dev are excluded in case they are an ancestor.

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You can delete a merged local branch with:

git branch -d branchname

If it’s not merged, use:

git branch -D branchname

To delete it from the remote use:

git push --delete origin branchname

git push origin :branchname    # for really old git

Once you delete the branch from the remote, you can prune to get rid of remote tracking branches with:

git remote prune origin

or prune individual remote tracking branches, as the other answer suggests, with:

git branch -dr branchname