stale-branches

Interactive CLI to list and delete stale git branches. Shows each branch's age, merge status, and last commit — then lets you delete them all in one session, local and remote.

→ xevrion.github.io/stale-branches

Features

• Branch table — age, merge status, last commit shown before the interactive prompt
• Merged pre-selected — safe defaults; unmerged branches shown in red and require an extra confirmation
• Local + remote — cleans up both in one pass, asks per-branch or use --remote to skip prompts
• Protected branches — never touches main, master, develop, dev, staging, production, or your current branch
• Command injection prevention — branch names are sanitized before any git call
• --dry-run — preview exactly what would be deleted without touching anything

npx stale-branches

Install

# Run without installing
npx stale-branches

# Or install globally
npm install -g stale-branches

Usage

# Interactive mode — shows all non-protected branches
stale-branches

# Only show merged branches
stale-branches --merged

# Only show branches older than 30 days
stale-branches --days 30

# Preview what would be deleted without actually deleting
stale-branches --dry-run

# Delete remote branches without asking
stale-branches --remote

Flags

| Flag | Description | |------|-------------| | --merged | Show only merged branches | | --dry-run | Print what would be deleted, don't delete anything | | --days <n> | Only show branches older than n days (default: 0) | | --remote | Delete remote branches automatically without confirmation |

Behaviour

• Protected branches — never shown or touched: main, master, develop, dev, staging, production, and your currently checked-out branch
• Merged branches — pre-selected by default (safe to delete)
• Unmerged branches — shown in red, not pre-selected, require an extra confirmation prompt
• Remote deletion — asked once for all selected branches that have remotes, unless --remote is passed
• Branch names — sanitized before passing to git to prevent command injection

Requirements

• Node.js >= 20
• Git

License

MIT