git-unneeded 1.0.4

Determine whether we don't need this clone (or some of its branches) anymore.

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 ...]

Options	Values	Help
positional arguments
directory	Default: .	GIT_DIR. Default current directory.
options
-h --help	Flag.	show this help message and exit
--color	Choice: never, always, auto Default: auto
--debug	Flag.	Exact git commands and decisions.
--quiet -q -s	Flag.	Just safe/not, no justification.
--oneline	Flag.	Just output directory\0True. Implies --quiet.
--skip-unknown-directories	Flag.	If a passed directory isn't a git repo, skip it. Not considered a failure.
--no-fetch	Flag.	Don't connect to any configured remotes. Local cache might be old.
--no-search-parent	Flag.	Don't search up parent directories for .git.

So for the annoying case of too many repos;

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