Deleting merged branches with Git

My friend and colleague at Fluidinfo, Manuel Cerón, gave me this script that he wrote to remove merged branches from local and remote Git repositories. Removing branches after merging is one of those fairly painless housekeeping tasks that doesn't create a great deal of friction, which makes it easy to avoid automating, but it wastes a lot of time as days and weeks go by.

#!/bin/bash

set -x

# Update the master branch.
git checkout master
git pull upstream master

# Synchronize the remote repository.
git push origin master

# Find all merged branches and delete them in the local and remote
# repositories.
for branch in `git branch --merged | grep -v '*' | tr -d ' '`
do
    git branch -d $branch
    git push origin :$branch
done

It's available in this gist. You can wire it up as a cleanbranches command by adding the following to your ~/.gitconfig file:

[alias]
    cleanbranches = !/home/jkakar/bin/gitcleanbranches.sh

Now you can run git cleanbranches in any repository and local and remote branches that have already been merged will be deleted automatically. It's a simple thing, but one of those simple things that makes a nice difference in the daily workflow.