git unneeded

Did you clone a large amount of git repos? Is ~/workspace/ a giant mess? Need to declutter?

If a remote exists and all branches have been pushed (or merged), and you trust the remote git host to stay up, maybe we don't need to keep the local copy. If a branch has been pushed/merged, we don't need to keep them.

But if there's local branch refs for commits that have never been pushed, maybe they should be pushed first. Or at least reviewed.

git unneeded will report whether deleting branches/repo would be safe, or whether there's stuff that needs attention. Doesn't delete anything for you. Can be happily run with a giant shell glob or from xargs.

Install

With uv: uv tool install git-unneeded

With pipx: pipx install git-unneeded

Usage

git unneeded -h

usage: git_unneeded.py [-h] [--color {never,always,auto}] [--debug] [--quiet]
                       [--oneline] [--skip-unknown-directories] [--no-fetch]
                       [--no-search-parent]
                       [directory ...]

directory

-h --help

--color

--debug

--quiet -q -s

--oneline

--skip-unknown-directories

--no-fetch

--no-search-parent

So for the annoying case of too many repos;

$ find ~/workspace -maxdepth 2 -name .git -type d -print0 | xargs -0 git unneeded --no-fetch