Delete large number of branches from remote

Question

I have a Git remote that has 1000 branches, and I want to delete all the branches whose name does not start with foo_. Is there an easy way to do that?

Answer 1

Short answer

If your remote is called "origin", run

git for-each-ref --format='%(refname:strip=3)' refs/remotes/origin/* | \
  grep -v '^foo_\|^HEAD$' | \
  xargs git push --delete origin

More details

Prefer git for-each-ref over git branch

The other answers suggest piping the output of git branch to grep or awk. However, such an approach is brittle: git branch is a Porcelain (i.e. high-level) command, whose output may change in a future Git release. A better alternative is to use git for-each-ref, a powerful Plumbing (i.e. low-level) command.

Explanation of the command

(Note: the following assumes that your remote is called "origin".)

Use git for-each-ref to list all the remote branches on origin in an adequate format:

git for-each-ref --format='%(refname:strip=3)' refs/remotes/origin/*

Pipe the output to

grep -v '^foo_\|HEAD$'

to discard HEAD and all the branches whose name starts with "foo_". Finally, pipe the output to

xargs git push --delete origin

to delete all the relevant remote branches from origin in one fell swoop.

Caveat: Of course, the command above won't be able to delete current branch of the remote if the latter doesn't start with "foo_".

Answer 2

Please use the following command in order to remove all branches with PREFIX on remote server.

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

You may want to do a dry-run first to see if it is the branches that you want to remove:

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

If you like a simpler approach, for instance delete 3 or 4 branches:

git push origin --delete <branch1> <branch2> <branch3>

For your further information:

1 - List all your remote branches:

 $ git branch -r

2 - Filter the branches by some regular expression. In this case we are 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:

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

4 - Remove any local reference to those branches:

$ git remote prune origin

Answer 3

You should be able to list all remote branches not starting with foo_ using:

git branch -l -r|grep -v 'origin/foo_'

If that looks OK to delete you can use xargs to redirect the output to a git push origin --delete command:

git branch -l -r|grep -v 'origin/foo_'|xargs git push origin --delete