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!