How to delete multiple local branches at once?

farmerpaul November 8, 2012

We use the git flow branching model, and I'm happy to see support for it in SourceTree and I make good use of it there. In this branching model, I find myself accumulating many feature branches (one corresponding to each of our JIRA issues), and after completing the feature I usually issue a pull request to have it merged into our main "develop" branch. However, what happens is I end up accumulating lots of feature branches that eventually have to all be deleted once they've been merged.

Is there a way to select several branches at once and ask SourceTree to delete all of them in one go? Ideally, it would delete all the ones for which git issued no warnings and skip those which produced warnings (because I don't want to accidentally delete any branches that haven't yet been merged).

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stevestreeting
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November 8, 2012

Actually there is a bulk delete branch option, it's just not that obvious :/

If you click the 'Branch' button, there's an extra tab labelled 'Delete Branches' where you can check the ones you want to delete (local or remote) and delete them all at once.

farmerpaul November 8, 2012

Sweet, thanks for pointing that out, Steve. Now... if only I could click one item, hold shift, then another item to select the range of branches, that would be awesome. :)

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stevestreeting
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November 8, 2012

Argh, so close! ;)

Vishwajeet Singh
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November 8, 2012

That makes feel so dumb :-p

passsy December 10, 2015

Thanks! But why is multiselect in the branch list not possible?

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Murali Prashanth January 15, 2016

Awesome

 

BlueRaja April 4, 2016

There's no shift+click to select multiple lines?  And there's no hitting space to check the checkbox?  You have to manually click the checkbox on every line!?

This dialog is practically unusable, does anyone on the Sourcetree team actually use it?

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Jared Schraub August 12, 2016

I never realized that was hiding in plain sight.  Thanks for the help.

Samantha Donga August 4, 2017

Thanks for your help.

Toby Beresford August 22, 2017

+1 @BlueRaja comment. I've just had to click 250 something times to delete all my local branches and remote branches.  I'd have thought this sort of bulk housekeeping is exactly the use case for something like SourceTree. Can't you turn it into a clicking game like Farmville! Or better still add a filter / select all...

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Dav Yaginuma May 15, 2018

I've spent years deleting branches one at a time cursing under my breath at the lousy UX. It's still a lousy UX (it should really just be supported to select multiple in the browser pane) but I'm glad to see it wasn't a complete product feature oversight.

Jim March 8, 2024

As of mid-January 2024, this no longer works. The checkboxes do not allow for more than one branch to be selected - they behave not like checkboxes but radio buttons. Hopefully Atlassian sees this as a bug and fixes it immediately

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Vishwajeet Singh
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November 8, 2012

AFAIK it's not possible to delete multiple branches in sourcetree, you would need to resort to git commandline for the same you can use git for-each-ref

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