If you are a developer and you contribute and work with a lot of branches, after some time you face the problem of having a lot of dead branches on you local machine. Yes, you can automate this task, just run a simple command and get rid of this painful job by simply cleanup the merged branches on localhost.
If that is your case, what I suggest you to do it’s to add an alias in your bash profile as the following:
1. Open bash profile
$ vi .bash_profile
2. Add the alias inside vim, in my case I used clean-branch
alias clean-branch='echo Cleaning merged branches && git branch --merged | egrep -v "(^\\*|master|dev)" | xargs git branch -d'
or you can run it directly in terminal
git branch --merged | xargs git branch -d
If you look at this command you can find an area having these specification: master|dev. All you need to do to escape a branch from beeing omited by this scrip is to add your branch name in this like for example I have a branch my-branch, the command will become alias clean-branch='echo Cleaning merged branches && git branch --merged | egrep -v "(^\\*|master|dev|my-branch)" | xargs git branch -d'
3. Reset your bash to understand the new command or you can simply open a new terminal
$ source .bash_profile
So that’s it. Now you can open a new terminal or type in the current one your alias command:
$ clean-branch
If you have questions please don’t hesitate to leave me a comment.
