appneta Delete Merged Branch
After merging a PR (gh pr merge), delete its head branch on origin — unless
it's protected. Stale merged branches accumulate fast in this repo (56 got
swept in one pass on 2026-08-15), and nobody references a feature/fix branch
by name once its work has landed on the target branch.
Protected — leave these alone
master(andmain, if ever renamed)- A bare version-number branch:
^v?[0-9]+(\.[0-9]+)*$— e.g.4.6.1,4.6.0,3.4. These are permanent release-history branches, not work-in-progress. - Anything the user names as an exception for this merge. Example from
2026-08-15:
4.6.1-beta1had to stay because an external OSS-Fuzz build config (project.yaml) still pointed its fuzzing job at that branch name. If unsure whether such a pin still applies, ask rather than assume it's gone.
Not protected — delete these, even if they look version-ish
A version number with a suffix (4.6.0-alpha, 4.5.0-beta3,
v4.5.3-beta2) is not a permanent branch — it's leftover from a pre-release
cycle that's over. Default to deleting it. The same goes for anything
descriptive (fix-*, Bug_*, credit-*, PR-author feature branches, etc.).
When genuinely unsure whether a branch name is "version-like enough" to
protect, treat it as not protected — the cost of a mistaken delete is low
(commits stay reachable via the target branch's history for anything that
was actually merged; git reflog/GitHub's branch-restore banner covers the
rest for a while), and the point of this skill is to stop clutter from
piling up.
How
gh pr merge <number> --merge --delete-branch
--delete-branch handles both the merge and cleanup in one call. If you
already merged without it, delete separately:
git push origin --delete <branch>
Either way, confirm and mention the branch is gone (or why it was kept) — don't do this silently.