branch maid

Cleans up your dusty Git branches.

Motivation

This tool is particularly useful for people using Github's commit squashing feature. See here for more information. If you merge pull requests with a merge commit, you could do something like git branch --merged develop and get a list of branches that merged into the develop branch because the commits in your pull request get merged in wholesale. If you prefer to use the commit squashing feature (e.g. for cleaner Git history), there's no way for Git to natively detect whether one of your branches has been merged because Github will actually squash all of the commits in your pull request and merge them into the base branch via a new commit. Different projects will have different settings for merging feature requests. Instead of trying to remember which projects use merge commits and which ones squash commits, you can just use branch maid to clean up branches that are associated with closed pull requests.

Getting Started

0. Go to Settings > Personal access tokens and create a Github API token with sufficient permissions to access the repositories with which you plan on using branch maid.
1. Clone the repository and optionally add branch-maid.rb to your PATH.

Usage

Run branch-maid.rb in the directory of a git repository to clean up your merged branches. See below for options.

Usage: branch-maid.rb [options]

Required:
    -t, --token TOKEN                Github API token

Optional:
    -g, --github-api URL             Default is https://api.github.com
    -n, --dry-run
    -v, --verbose