How to delete multiple local branches at once?
Asked by farmerpaul:

We use the git flow branching model, and I'm happy to see support for it in SourceTree and I make good use of it there. In this branching model, I find myself accumulating many feature branches (one corresponding to each of our JIRA issues), and after completing the feature I usually issue a pull request to have it merged into our main "develop" branch. However, what happens is I end up accumulating lots of feature branches that eventually have to all be deleted once they've been merged.

Is there a way to select several branches at once and ask SourceTree to delete all of them in one go? Ideally, it would delete all the ones for which git issued no warnings and skip those which produced warnings (because I don't want to accidentally delete any branches that haven't yet been merged).


Answers:
author: stevestreeting
body: Actually there is a bulk delete branch option, it's just not that obvious :/

If you click the 'Branch' button, there's an extra tab labelled 'Delete Branches' where you can check the ones you want to delete (local or remote) and delete them all at once.

comments: author: farmerpaul
body: Sweet, thanks for pointing that out, Steve. Now... if only I could click one item, hold shift, then another item to select the range of branches, that would be **awesome**. :)


author: stevestreeting
body: Argh, so close! ;)


author: Vishwajeet Singh
body: That makes feel so dumb :-p


author: passsy
body: Thanks! But why is multiselect in the branch list not possible?


author: Murali Prashanth
body: Awesome


author: BlueRaja
body: There's no shift+click to select multiple lines? And there's no hitting space to check the checkbox? You have to manually click the checkbox on every line!?

This dialog is practically unusable, does anyone on the Sourcetree team actually use it?


author: Jared Schraub
body: I never realized that was hiding in plain sight. Thanks for the help.


author: Samantha Donga
body: Thanks for your help.


author: Toby Beresford
body: +1 [@BlueRaja](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/572313) comment. I've just had to click 250 something times to delete all my local branches and remote branches. I'd have thought this sort of bulk housekeeping is exactly the use case for something like SourceTree. Can't you turn it into a clicking game like Farmville! Or better still add a filter / select all...


author: Dav Yaginuma
body: I've spent years deleting branches one at a time cursing under my breath at the lousy UX. It's still a lousy UX (it should really just be supported to select multiple in the browser pane) but I'm glad to see it wasn't a complete product feature oversight.


author: Jim
body: As of mid-January 2024, this no longer works. The checkboxes do not allow for more than one branch to be selected - they behave not like checkboxes but radio buttons. Hopefully Atlassian sees this as a bug and fixes it immediately


author: Taylor Plimpton
body: Shift clicking multiple branches works for me.


author: Vishwajeet Singh
body: AFAIK it's not possible to delete multiple branches in sourcetree, you would need to resort to git commandline for the same you can use git for-each-ref