Quickstart

Once gitsweeper is installed, there are two commands you'll use day-to-day: preview and cleanup.

See what would be deleted

preview is read-only — it lists every remote branch that's already been merged into the main branch, but doesn't delete anything:

$ gitsweeper preview
Fetching from the remote...

These branches have been merged into master:
  origin/merged_already_to_master

To delete them, run again with `gitsweeper cleanup`

Delete the merged branches

Once you're happy with the preview, run cleanup:

$ gitsweeper cleanup
Fetching from the remote...

These branches have been merged into master:
  origin/merged_already_to_master

Delete these branches? (y/n)

Confirm with y to delete. To skip the prompt entirely (useful in scripts and CI), pass --force:

gitsweeper cleanup --force

Common variations

# Use a different main branch
gitsweeper preview --master main

# Use a different remote
gitsweeper preview --origin upstream

# Skip specific branches (comma-separated, exact names — no globs)
gitsweeper preview --skip "release-2024,hotfix-prod"

# Faster but less thorough — skips squash-merge detection
gitsweeper preview --no-deep-check

# Search deeper history (default is 10,000 commits)
gitsweeper preview --max-commits 50000

# Show debug logging
gitsweeper preview --debug

See the flags reference for every option.

What "merged" means here

gitsweeper considers a branch merged if any of these are true:

1. Its tip commit appears in the main branch's history (regular merge / fast-forward).
2. Its content matches a commit in the main branch via git cherry / git patch-id (squash merge, rebase, cherry-pick).

The second check is what makes gitsweeper reliable on repositories that use GitHub's Squash and merge button — see Squash-Merge Detection for the details.