Automate maintenance of old outdated branches

240 votes

I work with GitHub a lot, through PR with my team.

Whenever a PR is merged, the remote branch is automatically deleted from GitHub, but I am left with the local version of it. From time to time a go around and delete those old branches but it's a bit tedious.

I would love it if there were some sort of "maintenance" tooling to automatically clean up my working copy, by deleting those old branches. This is currently made worse by the fact that when deleting a branch, the window sometimes scrolls back to the top.

This could also be a nice addition for all stashes that I created but forgot to clean up, or the automatic ones created when rebasing.

Under consideration Quality of Life Suggested by: Thibaud D. (15 Jun, '21) • Upvoted: 19 Apr • Comments: 24

Comments: 24

30 Aug, '21
Santiago G. Merged
As a user I would like to have the possibility to enable an option that autoprunes local branches that were deleted in the remote repository as long as it's not checked out.
1
13 Sep, '21
Lyndon Gingerich Merged
I think this is a duplicate of https://feedback.gitkraken.com/suggestions/191722/automate-maintenance-of-old-outdated-branches.
14 Sep, '21
Giacomo Zanotti Admin
"Support for autoprune local branches" (suggested by Santiago G. on 2021-08-30), including upvotes (2) and comments (0), was merged into this suggestion.
1
31 Jan, '22
J Edwards
Just chiming in that this feature would be a fantastic addition to this product. Is it likely coming in the foreseeable future?
22 Feb, '22
Zach
Came here from Google checking to see if this was already included.
+1 it would be nice to have local branch pruning, automatic or on a button.
23 Feb, '22
Frank Oosterhuis
I wanted to suggest a similar option.
I delete old branches by fireing up a terminal and execute "git branch -d `git branch -v | grep gone | awk '{ print $1 '}` "

Would love to see this under a button or a shortcut.
2
11 Mar, '22
Aurelien RB
I also would like an auto clean feature: I merge a lot of branches and spend many clicks per day cleaning local branches that have been merged on the origin
31 Mar, '22
Uğur Ekşi
We as a team make commits on a daily basis, create branches of our own, then merge them to a single branch. Then I am left with several redundant branches in my local. I would really like to do it automatically instead of deleting branches one by one.
11 Apr, '22
Stephan van Stekelenburg
Fork for example shows branches with a different icon based on the remote status.

From their changelog:

>> Show different branch icons according to upstream status
>> We added little icons to indicate the upstream status of local branches. There are different icons for branches that are

>> local only,
>> pushed upstream,
>> pushed upstream but their remote branch has been removed.
29 Jun, '22
Sam
Agree, this would be helpful. Fork's upstream status icons are extremely useful.
08 Jul, '22
Thomas
Git Extensions tells me when I have a local branch whose remote was deleted. Very nice to know which feature branches are completed and can be removed.
11 Jul, '22
crogers
bump, this would be very useful for my company as well.
09 Jan, '23
Dimi
Our company would also appreciate a way to delete obsolete local branches!
03 Feb, '23
Violeta
We would also appreciate this feature :)
17 May, '23
Jord
This is seconded, thirded, and... fourth-ed!
31 Jul, '23
P
Smartgit shows you which branches have been deleted on origin, it doesnt automatically delete them. Can we add an icon for that or something?
1
09 Aug, '23
Tomas
I'll really appreciate that!
09 Aug, '23
Ap
I'm genuinely surprised this isn't a feature yet!?
This is absolutely mandatory if you have more than just 2 devs in your team...
17 Aug, '23
Chris
+1 for this feature
28 Aug, '23
Simon
+1 for this
22 Sep, '23
Steve L
A colleague showed me this feature working in Fork... following my surprised noises, he laughed and asked (insert mocking voice) why GitKraken didnt have it - to which I responded confidently that it must do, because its just better (right?)...
So, I googled to find out how to turn it on....and now I find myself here - and faced with the horrific reality that I'm going to have to go back and admit that it doesn't. Is there a support group for this kind of situation?
12 Oct, '23
Corey Merged
I currently depend on a functionality in JetBrains to cleanup old branches. Even that one is clunky. I'd love to have the ability to cleanup old branches from local at will after it is determined that they have been merged/deleted on remote.
Similarly it seems that this could be applied to remote branches as well, and the only difference would be the method that delete is done.
13 Oct, '23
Joey Kelroy Admin
"Local Branch Cleanup" (suggested by Corey on 2023-10-12), including upvotes (1) and comments (0), was merged into this suggestion.
1
24 Oct, '23
padlee
any update? it is very useful
smartgit has same feature