A while back I was searching for a specific branch in one of my Github repositories. While scrolling through the branch list, it occurred to me that there were just too many branches to go through now (around 30 or so). Many of these branches were from the initial stages of the project, debugging branches, branches made for backups and branches which just had straight up wrong code. It was time for a clean-up.

Now, one could simply delete all those stale branches. But I would caution against it. When you have spent some time in the research business you realise that the universe is just waiting for you to commit such an action. Like deleting your old code without any backups. It will watch with glee as your professors, co-workers, paper reviewers and random people on the internet suddenly come out of the woodwork and start requesting you for the exact same code that you just deleted. Deleted because no one was using it!

So we will tag these branches before deleting them. Git provides this feature and we will create a lightweight tag per branch. These lightweight tags are simply pointers to a specific commit, hence the term “lightweight”. Tagging will keep the code in these stale branches in your repository (…for posterity or close enough) but at least away from sight and from your branch list.

Full confession, most of the commands given below this sentence you’re reading is from this Stackoverflow query, so make sure to check it out.

First get a fresh clean clone of the desired repository to be pruned.

git clone YOUR_REPOSITORY.git

Now a simple clone command will just clone the master (or as the young kids call it these days, the main branch). We want all the branches. Hence inside the newly cloned directory, we track all the branches

for remote in `git branch -r`; 
do 
    git branch --track ${remote#origin/} $remote; 
done

Tag the required branch directed for future deletion.

git tag archive/<branchname> <branchname>

Delete the old, decrepit branch

git branch -D <branchname>

Delete the old, decrypt branch…from your remote (i.e the Github repository)

git branch -d -r origin/<branchname>

Push the tags to the remote

git push --tags

Push changes to remote

git push origin :<branchname>

To get a branch back from a tag

git checkout -b <branchname> archive/<branchname>

And you are done. Now make a shell/bash script to automate the above steps if you have too many branches. May your code be safe, secured and look up-to-date.