Delete multiple remote branches in git

Question

I have a team member who inadvertently pushed over 150 of his local branches to our central repo. Thankfully, they all have the same prefix. Using that prefix, is there a gi

Answer 1

Neevek's solution is elegant, but it can be better: the solution as proposed calls 'git push' once per branch, which means an additional network round-trip per branch to be deleted. Since you're using awk anyway, why not use it to prefix the ':' and then xargs can call 'git push' exactly once and delete all the branches at once:

Dry-run to list the branches that would be deleted:

git branch -r | awk -F/ '/\/PREFIX/{print ":" $2}'

Final solution to actually push the deletes:

git branch -r | awk -F/ '/\/PREFIX/{print ":" $2}' | xargs git push origin

Answer 2

Thanks to Steve and Neevek, I found a solution that worked pretty well for me I figured worth sharing:

Steve's solution worked for me with one minor adjustment. My remotes were named origin/feature/some-feature-name so I trimmed your awk:

git branch -r | awk -Forigin/ '/\/feature/ {print $2 $3}' | xargs -I {} git push origin :{}

It's now doing a nice little delete flow:

To github.com:project/project-name.git
- [deleted]         feature/search-min-chars
To github.com:project/project-name.git
- [deleted]         feature/search-placeholder
To github.com:project/project-name.git
- [deleted]         feature/server-error-message
To github.com:project/project-name.git
- [deleted]         feature/six-point-asterisk

Was wondering if anyone had any ideas for a more elegant solution, though, that might output something like this (my CLI scripting is pretty poor, so it'd take me awhile to figure this out):

git push origin :feature/search-min-chars :feature/search-placeholder :feature/server-error-message :feature/six-point-asterisk

This would result in a nice single output with one network request:

To github.com:project/project-name.git
- [deleted]         feature/search-min-chars
- [deleted]         feature/search-placeholder
- [deleted]         feature/server-error-message
- [deleted]         feature/six-point-asterisk

Answer 3

Dry run:

git branch -r --list 'origin/your-branch-name/*' | sed "s/origin\///" | xargs -I {} echo {}

Delete remote branches:

git branch -r --list 'origin/your-branch-name/*' | sed "s/origin\///" | xargs -I {} git push origin --delete {}

Delete only fully merged remote branches:

git branch -r --merged --list 'origin/your-branch-name/*' | sed "s/origin\///" | xargs -I {} git push origin --delete {}

Explanation:

sed "s/origin\///" will remove origin/ from the branch name. Without stripping that away I got: remote ref does not exist

Answer 4

I realize this is for git command, but if you looking for an alternate solution to do the similar or same result:

You can do it from here (Git Remove Remote Branches):

Then select the branches you want:

Make sure you have the permissions to remove the remote branches.

Answer 5

Thanks to Neevek for great and elegant solution!

But i have some troubles with slashes in branch names (i'm using Git Flow), because of awk field separator / (-F option)

So my solution is based on Neevek's, but correctly parses branch names with /. In this case i presume that your remote called origin. Command for deleting remote branches with names staring with PATTERN:

git branch -r | awk -Forigin/ '/\/PATTERN/ {print $2}' | xargs -I {} git push origin :{}

And don't forget to check what you are going to delete:

git branch -r | awk -Forigin/ '/\/PATTERN/ {print $2}'

USEFUL TIP: If your branch names (without origin/ prefix) stored in a text file (one branch name per line), just run:

cat your_file.txt | xargs -I {} git push origin :{}

Answer 6

resource https://coderwall.com/p/eis0ba

    1 - List all your remote branches:

    $ git branch -r

    2 - Filter the branches by some regular expression. In this case I'm interested in deleting any branch with the 'feature-' prefix:

    $ git branch -r | awk -F/ '/\/feature-/{print $2}'
    3 - Pipe the last command to git push to delete them:
    # **Edit** - Removed extra colon, which is not needed
    $ git branch -r | awk -F/ '/\/feature-/{print $2}' | xargs -I {} git push origin {}
    4 - Grab a beer.

    5 - Remove any local reference to those branches:

    $ git remote prune origin