branchguard

Clean up stale and merged git branches.

Install

pip install branchguard

uv tool install branchguard

brew install branchguard

Usage

Scan for branches that can be pruned (dry run, nothing gets deleted):

branchguard

Or explicitly:

branchguard scan

Only show branches that have been merged into main:

branchguard scan --merged

Check against a different target branch:

branchguard scan --target develop

Show branches older than 30 days instead of the default 90:

branchguard scan --days 30

Include remote branches:

branchguard scan --remote

Actually delete the branches:

branchguard scan --force

Get JSON output:

branchguard scan --json

What the output looks like

          branchguard
┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━┓
┃ Branch             ┃ Last Commit ┃ Age (days) ┃ Merged? ┃ Status  ┃
┡━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━┩
│ feature/old-login  │ 2024-08-15  │        185 │ yes     │ merged  │
│ fix/header-bug     │ 2024-09-01  │        168 │ no      │ stale   │
│ feature/signup     │ 2024-11-20  │         88 │ yes     │ merged  │
└────────────────────┴─────────────┴────────────┴─────────┴─────────┘

Found 3 branches to prune. Run with --force to delete.

All options

Why I built this

I kept accumulating dozens of stale branches in every repo I worked on. Every few weeks I would manually run git branch --merged and delete them one by one, or I would forget and end up with 50+ branches cluttering my local. I wanted a single command that shows me what is safe to delete and lets me clean up in one shot.

License

MIT