Remove git orphan branches for *nix based OS.

I've already posted how to remove orphan branches if you develop on windows. This post is just a small addition but for those who develops on *nix based OSes. 

The problem is very simple, you develop something, you push it, you get your branch merged, then you need manually remove local branches. It can be easily automated, first we need to run

git branch -vv

and then remove all branches that have no remote branches.

git branch -D branch_name

It's possible to write a simple bash script that checks git branches and then just removes ones that no longer have remote branches. I'm not a huge fan os bash so I decided to go with python. It's more convenient, predictable and easier to use. Bellow is the script itself.

#!/usr/bin/env python
import subprocess

cmd_output = subprocess.check_output('git branch -vv', shell=True)

output_lines = cmd_output.split('\n')

to_remove = []

for line in output_lines:
    if line.startswith('*'): # skip current branch
        continue

    if 'gone' in line: # there is no remote branch
        line_segments = line.strip().split(' ')
        branch = line_segments[0]
        to_remove.append(branch)

if not to_remove:
    print('There is nothing to remove, consider running `git fetch` and `git remote prune origin`')

for branch in to_remove:
    subprocess.call('git branch -D ' + branch, shell=True)

Let's save this file as git-clean. Of cause you can use whatever name your want, but then please adjust the instructions bellow. 

In order to make it more convenient to use let's make it executable by running 

chmod +x git-clean

and add this executable to the PATH variable. Simply go to your home folder and find there the .bash_profile. Open it and add the path to the folder where your git-clean is located. In my case it's ~/projects/tools.

export PATH="~/projects/tools:$PATH"

Now restart your terminal and  git-clean should be globally available.

P.S. this script uses python 2.x. and with python 3.x is should be possible to achieve the same result easier.

Remove git orphan branches

Quite often especially when you create a pull request for some short time you have a local branch and a corresponding remote one that you track. But after your pull request is merged and remote branch is removed you still have your local branch.

If you run command

git remote prune origin

It will check if branches that you track are still there, if not  then your local branches are orphans now.

If you run now

git branch -vv

Then you will get a nice info about each branch

Here we can see that branch_a is gone, git literally says it. This is our orphan branch. No we can run the following command to remove it.

git branch -D branch_a

But what if we have 5 or 10 branches that became orphans? It would be nice to have some helper function that automates this process.

If your working environment is windows you can easily add a helper function into your powershell profile. Just go to powershell console and run

notepad $profile

And add the code bellow at the end of your powershell profile.

function git-clean() {
 git branch -vv | Where {$_.Contains("gone")} | ForEach -Process { git branch -D $_.Split()[2] }
}

Now every time you open a powershell console it will scan your profile and import all functions declared there. Now you can simply run git-clean and it will do all magic.

As summary just run

git remote prune origin
git-clean

P.S. if you have just added this function you need first to restart you powershell console to make this function available.