Remove all your local git branches but keep main

I frequently search for the code to delete all local branches except master so I can copy/paste the result, but I always get the "master" version of this — which doesn't help the copy/paste part of it.

$ git branch | grep -v "main" | xargs git branch -D 

Here's hoping this becomes the top result so I can speed up my process by one second. We all know I'll never actually remember the command.

Happy coding!

Comments

[Lorena Capo]

omg thanks :)

[Rubin]

most of my local branches have a prefix. So when i needed to cleanup all the local branches except the prod ,i have an alias set as git_branch_delete="git branch | grep $@ | xargs git branch -D". So i just do git_branch_delete flip and deletes all branches starting with flip prefix

[Amir.H Ebrahimi]

make an alias out of it which also protect master and dev branches,
and also try to delete them in safer way with -d instead of -D.

alias gitrm='git branch --merged | egrep -v "(^\*|master|main|dev)" | xargs git branch -d'

[Carl Walsh]

git branch --merged doesn't work well if your team uses GitHub squash commits to merge PRs: stackoverflow.com/a/19309568/771768

I've had a lot of success with my script that:

1. Get all local git branches
2. Uses github API to query for all merged/closed PRs with the same branch names
3. Deletes the remote git branch on GitHub (useful if your repo doesn't do this automatically)
4. Deletes the local git branch (but if that branch is currently checked out, switch to default branch first)

[Layton Whiteley]

If you want to delete only branches that have been deleted remotely then git fetch --prune is an option

[Serhat Teker]

Nice. Just one thing; it only deletes local ones.

[Stephen Chiang]

You can create an alias function like this:

removeLocals = "!f() { git branch | grep -v "main" | xargs git branch -D; }; f"

used: git removeLocals

or if you want to account for master vs main

removeLocals = "!f() { git branch | grep -v /"$1/" | xargs git branch -D; }; f"

used: git removeLocals main

I recommend not doing the second one as you may accidentally remove your local version of main/master due to a typo

You could also just make two aliases removeLocalsMain and removeLocalsMaster

[Jaya Krishnan Nair]

i think instead of main $(git_main_branch) should be helpful

[Mark Harless]

That's a great tip! Thanks!

[Ben Lovy]

Every time I successfully use xargs I spend the next several hours thinking "whoa, I did an xargs". It somehow never gets old.

Solid xargs, good stuff.

[Lucas Perez]

One observation to be made is if you for some reason has another branch that has "main" as part of its name, this command would not delete it. Maybe grep -v "^\*\? *main$", but then its getting already too complicated... 😅