Axe 🪓

A CLI tool to chop down Git branches that have been squash-merged on GitHub.

Features

• 🔍 Find branches that are ready to axe (squash-merged but still local)
• 🪓 Chop merged branches with confirmation
• ⚡ Fast parallel GitHub API calls (10x faster than sequential)
• 🎨 Pretty colored output with progress spinners
• 🔒 Safe validates repository and confirms before deleting

Prerequisites

• Go 1.21 or later
• Git
• GitHub CLI (gh) installed and authenticated

Installation

cd ~/Developer/axe
go install

This will install the axe binary to $GOPATH/bin (typically ~/go/bin).

Make sure $GOPATH/bin is in your PATH:

export PATH=$PATH:$(go env GOPATH)/bin

Usage

Find branches ready to axe

# List all squash-merged branches
axe branches

# Show PR details (verbose)
axe branches -v

# Show all branches with their PR status
axe branches --all

# Also works with aliases
axe list
axe ls

# Check a specific repository
axe branches -r /path/to/repo

Chop down merged branches

# Chop with confirmation prompt
axe chop

# Dry run (see what would be chopped)
axe chop --dry-run

# Skip confirmation and chop immediately
axe chop --force

# Also works with aliases
axe clean
axe delete
axe rm

# Check a specific repository
axe chop -r /path/to/repo

Disable colors (for CI/CD)

axe branches --no-color
axe chop --no-color --force

How it works

1. Validates you're in a git repository
2. Fetches all local branches (excluding main and master)
3. Checks GitHub in parallel (10 workers) for merged PRs using gh pr list
4. Lists or chops branches that have been squash-merged

Note: Branches are force-deleted (git branch -D) because squash-merged commits have different SHAs than the original commits, so Git doesn't recognize them as merged.

Examples

# See which branches are ready to axe
axe branches -v

# Preview what would be chopped
axe chop --dry-run

# Chop them down!
axe chop

# Quick chop without confirmation
axe chop -f

Output Examples

Default: List merged branches

⠋ Fetching local branches...
✓ Found 45 local branches
⠙ Looking for branches to chop (43 to check)...
✓ Found 5 branches ready to axe

🪓 Found 5 branch(es) to axe:
  feature/old-login
  bugfix/typo-fix
  refactor/cleanup
  ...

Show all branch statuses

axe branches --all

⠋ Fetching local branches...
✓ Found 45 local branches
⠙ Checking PR status for 43 branches...
✓ Completed status check for 43 branches

🪓 Merged (ready to axe): 5 branch(es)
  feature/old-login (#123) Fix login flow
  bugfix/typo-fix (#124) Fix typo in header
  refactor/cleanup (#125) Code cleanup

📂 Open PR: 3 branch(es)
  feature/new-ui (#126) Add new dashboard UI
  feature/auth (#127) Implement OAuth

✏️ Draft PR: 2 branch(es)
  feature/experimental (#128) Testing new API

❌ Closed (not merged): 1 branch(es)
  feature/abandoned (#129) Abandoned work

🔍 No PR: 32 branch(es)
  temp/test-branch
  experimental/new-feature
  ...

Chopping branches

🪓 Chop these branches? [y/N]: y
⠹ Chopping 5 branches...
✓ Chopped 5 branches

✓ Chopped: feature/old-login
✓ Chopped: bugfix/typo-fix
...

🪓 Chopped 5 branch(es)!