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
What 986 million code pushes say about the developer workflow in 2025
Nearly a billion commits later, the way we ship code has changed for good. Here’s what the 2025 Octoverse data says about how devs really work now.
Introducing Agent HQ: Any agent, any way you work
At Universe 2025, GitHub’s next evolution introduces a single, unified workflow for developers to be able to orchestrate any agent, any time, anywhere.
Octoverse: A new developer joins GitHub every second as AI leads TypeScript to #1
In this year’s Octoverse, we uncover how AI, agents, and typed languages are driving the biggest shifts in software development in more than a decade.