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How to delete all your local branches but keep master

Ben Halpern on April 27, 2019

I find myself searching for this git one-liner a lot, so I figured I'd drop it here to help future searchers: git branch | grep -v "master" | xa...
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lesha 🟨⬛️ •

Or better, delete everything merged into master, leaving out branches that can contain work in progress

git branch --merged master | grep -v "master" | xargs git branch -D
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James Allen •

I was waiting for instructions to rm -fr the project and git clone it again 😉 this is much better!

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Anton •

rm -rf is such a danger. I heard about how dangerous it is, but was oblivious to its power until I deleted a valuable folder!

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Koen van Gilst •

And on Windows? 😢

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Jakub Leško • • Edited

PowerShell in Windows has slightly different syntax, but you can achieve the same result with the line below :)

git branch | Select-String -NotMatch -Pattern "master" | %{ git branch -D $_.ToString().Trim() }
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Koen van Gilst •

Thanks, I should definitely look into Powershell a bit more (first time on a contract for a client with a Windows stack)

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lesha 🟨⬛️ •

I mean, this is cool and all, but PS syntax is too explicit imo

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Adil Fulara •

Use Linux subsystem 😂

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Koen van Gilst •

Blocked by the corporate proxy 😢😤

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Sung M. Kim • • Edited

Wow that was perfect as I was deleting about multiple local branches manually!

Left with two and tried that one above and worked fabulously!

demo

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Vinay Hegde •

The feeling you've after the command finishes execution

Like a boss

PS: Don't forget to run git checkout master

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buphmin •

Just make sure to back up everything first :P

git push --all {remote}

Oh man if I forgot to back up first...that would ruin so many things for me. We have a tendency to re-prioritize things so some branches are left half done for awhile, sometimes many months.

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David J Eddy •

A handy one indeed @ben . I went one step further and created an alias "git repo cleanup" in my ~/.bash_rc . Keeping a clean local is super helpful when projects get large and dozens of devs have you reviewing / checking / assisting daily.

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Saurabh Sharma •

Is there any way to merge everything in master before deleting?

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lesha 🟨⬛️ •

It's generally not a good idea. If you finished working on a feature branch, merge it. If a branch isn't merged, it contains work in progress. Work in progress means something isn't working there. Also mass merging often leads to lots of conflicts.

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Saurabh Sharma •

Oh thanks

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Stephen Chiang •

I was just looking for something like this, thanks!

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Stephen Chiang •

Here's one if you want to keep both master and develop:

> git branch | grep -v "master\|develop" | xargs git branch -D
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Ben Halpern •

👌

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Khoa Huỳnh •

This is awesome!!!