git-sweep
A command-line tool that helps you clean up Git branches that have been merged into master.
One of the best features of Git is cheap branches. There are existing branching models like GitHub Flow and Vincent Driessen's git-flow that describe methods for using this feature.
The problem
Your master
branch is typically where all your code lands. All features
branches are meant to be short-lived and merged into master
once they are
completed.
As time marches on, you can build up a long list of branches that are no
longer needed. They've been merged into master
, what do we do with them
now?
The answer
Using git-sweep
you can safely remove remote branches that have been
merged into master.
To install it run:
pip install git-sweep || easy_install git-sweep
Try it for yourself (safely)
To see a list of branches that git-sweep detects are merged into your master branch:
You need to have your Git repository as your current working directory.
$ cd myrepo
The preview
command doesn't make any changes to your repo.
$ git-sweep preview Fetching from the remote These branches have been merged into master: branch1 branch2 branch3 branch4 branch5 To delete them, run again with `git-sweep cleanup`
If you are happy with the list, you can run the command that deletes these
branches from the remote, cleanup
:
$ git-sweep cleanup Fetching from the remote These branches have been merged into master: branch1 branch2 branch3 branch4 branch5 Delete these branches? (y/n) y deleting branch1 (done) deleting branch2 (done) deleting branch3 (done) deleting branch4 (done) deleting branch5 (done) All done! Tell everyone to run `git fetch --prune` to sync with this remote. (you don't have to, yours is synced)
Note: this can take a little time, it's talking over the tubes to the remote.
You can also give it a different name for your remote and master branches.
$ git-sweep preview --master=develop --origin=github ...
Tell it to skip the git fetch
that it does by default.
$ git-sweep preview --nofetch These branches have been merged into master: branch1 To delete them, run again with `git-sweep cleanup --nofetch`
Make it skip certain branches.
$ git-sweep preview --skip=develop Fetching from the remote These branches have been merged into master: important-upgrade upgrade-libs derp-removal To delete them, run again with `git-sweep cleanup --skip=develop`
Once git-sweep finds the branches, you'll be asked to confirm that you wish to delete them.
Delete these branches? (y/n)
You can use the --force
option to bypass this and start deleting
immediately.
$ git-sweep cleanup --skip=develop --force Fetching from the remote These branches have been merged into master: important-upgrade upgrade-libs derp-removal deleting important-upgrade (done) deleting upgrade-libs (done) deleting derp-removal (done) All done! Tell everyone to run `git fetch --prune` to sync with this remote. (you don't have to, yours is synced)
Deleting local branches
You can also clean up local branches by using simple hack:
$ cd myrepo $ git remote add local $(pwd) $ git-sweep cleanup --origin=local
Development
git-sweep uses git-flow for development and release cylces. If you want to
hack on this with us, fork the project and put a pull request into the
develop
branch when you get done.
To run the tests, bootstrap Buildout and run this command:
$ git clone http://github.com/arc90/git-sweep.git $ cd git-sweep $ python2.7 bootstrap.py ... $ ./bin/buildout ... $ ./bin/test
We also use Tox. It will run the tests for Python 2.6 and 2.7.
$ ./bin/tox
Requirements
- Git >= 1.7
- Python >= 2.6
License
Friendly neighborhood MIT license.