Blog post about cleaning merged branches

Author: haacked

_posts/2025/2025-04-17-git-gone.md

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+---
+title: "Cleaning up gone branches"
+description: "A git alias to clean up gone branches. Even ones that have been squashed and merged."
+tags: [git]
+image: https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/4ac1c607-5b6f-40d8-8d93-554658fb80bf
+---
+
+A long time ago, I wrote a [useful set of git aliases](https://haacked.com/archive/2014/07/28/github-flow-aliases/) to support the GitHub flow. My favorite alias was `bdone` which would:
+
+1. Checkout the default branch.
+2. Run `git up` to make sure you're up to date.
+3. Run `git bclean` to delete all the branches that have been merged into the default branch.
+
+And this worked great for a long time. The way it worked was it would list all the branches that have been merged into the default branch and then delete them. In my case, I didn't use `git branch --merged` to list merged branches because I didn't know about it at the time.
+
+However, my aliases stopped working for me recently after joining PostHog. The main reason is on pretty much all of their repositories, they use Squash and Merge when merging PRs.
+
+![Image](https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/4ac1c607-5b6f-40d8-8d93-554658fb80bf)
+
+When you use `git merge --squash` or GitHub's "Squash and merge" feature, Git creates a new commit on the target branch that combines all the changes from the source branch into a single commit. This new commit doesn't retain any reference to the original commits from the source branch. As a result, Git doesn't consider the source branch as merged, and commands like `git branch --merged` won't show it.
+
+But here's the thing about Git. There's almost always a way.
+
+## Solution
+
+When you merge a PR on GitHub, it shows you a "Delete branch" button:
+
+![Image](https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/b972f11c-985e-4586-874b-b57575ecebdc)
+
+This is a great feature. It's a good way to clean up branches that have been merged into the default branch. In fact, you can configure GitHub to "Automatically delete head branches" when merged:
+
+![Image](https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/b73144f6-b457-4f13-b092-933a8aac27dd)
+
+I highly recommend you do the same. When the remote branch is deleted, Git will track it as "gone". For example, if you run `git branch -vv` you'll see something like this:
+
+```bash
+> git branch -vv
+
+  haacked/decide-v4      ba39408 [origin/haacked/decide-v4: gone] Fix demo to handle variants
+  haacked/fix-sample-app ec15751 [origin/haacked/fix-sample-app] Handle variants
+* haacked/local-only     e78d2f6 Do important stuff
+  main                   ab885d0 [origin/main] chore: Bump to v1.0.2
+```
+
+Notice that `haacked/decide-v4` is marked as `gone`.
+
+We can use git's porcelain to list branches and their tracking information in a more easily parseable format.
+
+```bash
+> git for-each-ref --format='%(refname:short) %(upstream:track)' refs/heads/
+
+haacked/decide-v4 [gone]
+haacked/fix-sample-app
+haacked/local-only
+master
+```
+
+Let's make this an alias to list these gone branches:
+
+```bash
+> git config --global alias.gone "!git for-each-ref --format='%(refname:short) %(upstream:track)' refs/heads/ | awk '\$2 == \"[gone]\" { print \$1 }'"
+```
+
+Now we can use the alias to list gone branches:
+
+```bash
+> git gone
+
+haacked/decide-v4
+```
+
+Next step is to update my old `bclean` alias to use the new `gone` alias.
+
+```bash
+> git config --global alias.bclean "!git gone | xargs -r git branch -D"
+```
+
+Unfortunately, since git doesn't know it's been merged, we have to do a force delete. That's a bit scary, but this won't touch local branches or any branches that are still tracking a remote branch. With this alias, you can run `git bclean` to delete all the branches that have been merged into the default branch. Finally, we have the old `bdone` alias to switch to the default branch, run `git up`, and then run `bclean`.
+
+Here's the complete set of aliases mentioned in this post you can cut and paste into your `.gitconfig`:
+
+```ini
+[alias]
+    default = "!git symbolic-ref refs/remotes/origin/HEAD | sed 's@^refs/remotes/origin/@@'"
+    bclean = "!git gone | xargs -r git branch -D"
+    # Switches to specified branch (or the default branch if no branch is specified), runs git up, then runs bclean.
+    bdone = "!f() { DEFAULT=$(git default); git checkout ${1-$DEFAULT} && git up && git bclean; }; f"
+    gone = "!git for-each-ref --format='%(refname:short) %(upstream:track)' refs/heads/ | awk '$2 == \"[gone]\" { print $1 }'"
+```
+
+Or, if you want to use the `git` command line, you can use the following:
+
+```bash
+git config --global alias.default "!git symbolic-ref refs/remotes/origin/HEAD | sed 's@^refs/remotes/origin/@@'"
+git config --global alias.gone "!git for-each-ref --format='%(refname:short) %(upstream:track)' refs/heads/ | awk '\$2 == \"[gone]\" { print \$1 }'"
+git config --global alias.bclean "!git gone | xargs -r git branch -D"
+git config --global alias.bdone "!f() { DEFAULT=\$(git default); git checkout \${1:-\$DEFAULT} && git up && git bclean; }; f"
+```
+
+> [!NOTE]
+> When using the `git default` alias, it's possible you'll encounter the following error:
+>
+> ```bash
+> fatal: ref refs/remotes/origin/HEAD is not a symbolic ref
+>```
+> 
+> This alias relies on the presence of the origin/HEAD symbolic reference. In some cases, especially with newly cloned repositories or certain configurations, this reference might not be set. To fix it:
+> 
+> ```bash
+> git remote set-head origin --auto
+> ```
+
+So now, my old workflow is back. When I merge a PR, I can run `git bdone` from the branch I merged to clean up the branches. All is right with the world again.