Tidying up after Pull Requests
At GitHub, we love to use Pull Requests all day, every day. The only trouble is that we end up with a lot of defunct branches after Pull Requests have…
At GitHub, we love to use Pull Requests all day, every day. The only trouble is that we end up with a lot of defunct branches after Pull Requests have been merged or closed. From time to time, one of us would clear out these branches with a script, but we thought it would be better to take care of this step as part of our regular workflow on GitHub.com.
Starting today, after a Pull Request has been merged, you’ll see a button to delete the lingering branch:
If the Pull Request was closed without being merged, the button will look a little different to warn you about deleting unmerged commits:
Of course, you can only delete branches in repositories that you have push access to.
Enjoy your tidy repositories!
Written by
Related posts
GitHub Availability Report: November 2025
In November, we experienced three incidents that resulted in degraded performance across GitHub services.
The new identity of a developer: What changes and what doesn’t in the AI era
Discover how advanced AI users are redefining software development—shifting from code producers to strategic orchestrators—through delegation, verification, and a new era of AI-fluent engineering.
Your stack, your rules: Introducing custom agents in GitHub Copilot for observability, IaC, and security
Use partner-built Copilot agents to debug, secure, and automate engineering workflows across your terminal, editor, and github.com.