Tend your Git garden with Git Bonsai

written on Tuesday, March 30, 2021

If you are like me, your git repository checkouts have a tendency to accumulate lots of branches over time.

Git Bonsai is a command line tool to help you clean this bush.

What does it do?

Git Bonsai can perform the following tasks for you:

• Fetch remote changes, then loop over all your tracking branches and update them to their remote counterparts.

• List merged branches and let you select which ones to delete.

• Do the same for duplicated branches (when you have multiple branches pointing to the same commit).

Git Bonsai in action

Here is an example repository:

topic1 and topic1-1 branches can be safely deleted. topic2 cannot. One of duplicate1 and duplicate2 can also be deleted, but not both.

Let's run Git Bonsai:

$ git bonsai

Info: Fetching changes
These branches point to the same commit, but no other branch contains this
commit, so you can delete all of them but one.

Select branches to delete:
> [x] duplicate1
  [x] duplicate2

I press Space to uncheck duplicate1, then Enter to continue.

Info: Deleting duplicate2

Select branches to delete:
> [x] topic1, contained in:
      - master
      - duplicate1

  [x] topic1-1, contained in:
      - topic1
      - duplicate1
      - master

Looks good to me, so I press Enter.

Info: Deleting topic1
Info: Deleting topic1-1

Let's look at the repository now:

Get it

Binaries for Linux, macOS and Windows are available on the release page.

Git Bonsai is written in Rust, so if you have cargo installed, you can install Git Bonsai with cargo install git-bonsai.