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PRUNING.md

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Pruning / housekeeping

Every now and then, you'll want to go through a 3-stage process of pruning/housekeeping feature branches, bugfix branches, old tags, etc. that you don't need anymore and want to remove in order to reduce cruft building up in the repo.

It is a little involved, and it's best to do it in the following 3 stages, in the following order:

1. Prune remote branches and tags

Your remote repo provider might provide a handy web UI to just list branches and tags, and delete the ones you don't want from a web browser. If so, that's the easiest way to do this. Failing that, you can do it from the commandline. First, git pull to get the latest remote branches and tags. Then, list the remote branches and tags, and push deletes for the ones you want to get rid of:

$ git branch -r
  origin/master
  origin/my-new-feature

$ git tag
Release1.88(28)
Release1.90(30)

$ git push origin --delete "my-new-feature"
To https://bitbucket.org/my/repo.git
 - [deleted]           my-new-feature

 $ git push origin --delete "Release1.88(28)"
To https://bitbucket.org/my/repo.git
 - [deleted]           Release1.88(28)

2. Prune local tags and tracking branches

The pruning of local tags and tracking branches can be automated and set as a handy alias, git doprune (see Deleting a branch for more info on this). Run this command.

3. Prune local non-tracking branches

If you've checked out any local non-tracking branches, for example in order to make modifications to that branch locally and push the changes, you'll need to manually delete these local branches; for example, assuming this was done with the my-new-feature branch whose remote branch was deleted and pruned above:

$ git branch
* master
  my-new-feature <-- (non-tracking branch still here!)

$ git branch -d my-new-feature
Deleted branch my-new-feature (was d175c79).

$ git branch
* master

Note that using git branch -d instead of git branch -D here will keep things safe because the branch will only be deleted if git detects it's been merged. If you really want to delete the branch anyway, you can use git branch -D [branchname].

A relatively safe automated way of deleting your local non-tracking branches is first to checkout master:

$ git checkout master
Switched to branch 'master'
Your branch is up to date with 'origin/master'.

Then to run the following command from bash shell (it works even in Windows' git bash shell):

$ git branch --merged | egrep -v "(^\*|master|release)" | xargs git branch -d

This will soft-delete non-tracking branches (ie. only delete ones that are fully merged), except for ones that are filtered out by the egrep part; these are "long-lived" branches you want to keep around. You may have a few of these - such as release in the above example - and of course you'll always have master, which should be kept around.