Arborist

Prune orphaned branches from a forest of repos.

Synopsys

Arborist is intended to prevent orphaned or dead branches from accumulating in multi-repo projects. It compares branches across any number of git repos hosted on GitHub, although it may also be used to prune branches from a single repo.

Branches with commits "ahead" of a repo's "default branch" are always preserved. If a branch is even with or behind the "default branch", all other repos are inspected for a branch of the same name which is ahead of master. The branch will be preserved if any other repo's matching branch is ahead of its "default branch", otherwise it is a candidate for removal.

Installation

Binary Releases

Binaries are published as GitHub Releases.

Downloading Dangerous Shellcode From the Internet And Executing It

mkdir -p ~/bin
cd ~/bin
\curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jhoblitt/arborist/main/install.sh | bash -s

Usage

$ GITHUB_TOKEN=<token> arborist

Complete Example

 ~/tmp/arborist-test $ cat .arborist.yaml
---
noop: false
repos:
  - repo: jhoblitt/arborist-test1
    noop: false
  - repo: jhoblitt/arborist-test2
    noop: true
exclude_patterns:
  - main
 ~/tmp/arborist-test $ export GITHUB_TOKEN=<...>
 ~/tmp/arborist-test $ arborist
jhoblitt/arborist-test1 default branch is: main
jhoblitt/arborist-test2 default branch is: main
jhoblitt/arborist-test1:bar -- ahead: 0, behind: 0
jhoblitt/arborist-test1:baz -- ahead: 0, behind: 0
jhoblitt/arborist-test1:foo -- ahead: 1, behind: 2
ignoring branch: foo because it is ahead
jhoblitt/arborist-test2:bar -- ahead: 0, behind: 0
jhoblitt/arborist-test2:baz -- ahead: 0, behind: 0
jhoblitt/arborist-test2:foo -- ahead: 0, behind: 0
ignoring branch: foo because it is known to be ahead in jhoblitt/arborist-test1
ignoring jhoblitt/arborist-test2:bar as the repo has noop=true
ignoring jhoblitt/arborist-test2:baz as the repo has noop=true
Branches to be pruned: 2
jhoblitt/arborist-test1:bar -- ahead: 0, behind: 0
deleting jhoblitt/arborist-test1:bar
jhoblitt/arborist-test1:baz -- ahead: 0, behind: 0
deleting jhoblitt/arborist-test1:baz

GitHub API Token

arborist uses GitHub's API and requires an API token to function. This may be provided by setting the env var GITHUB_TOKEN or specified with the --github-token flag. The env var should generally be preferred as this does not result in a "secret" being visible in the host's process table.

Config File

Most configuration is in the form of a .arborist.yaml file. By default, this file is expected to be in the same path from which arborist was invoked. The location of the configuration file may be overridden with the --conf flag.

GITHUB_TOKEN=... arborist --conf /foo/bar/baz.yaml

The config file is in vanilla yaml format.

Example .arborist.yaml:

---
noop: true  # default
repos:
  - repo: jhoblitt/arborist-test1
    noop: false
  - repo: jhoblitt/arborist-test2
    noop: true  # default
exclude_patterns:
  - main

Top Level Config

Key	Description
noop	A "master arm switch" for branch deletion. When true no branches may be deleted. When false, branches in a repo may be deleted but only if the noop: false is also set on the repo directly. Defaults to true.
repos	A Sequence (list) of Mappings (hashes) that configure which repo(s) make up the forest in Repo Config format. At least one repo must be specified.
exclude_pattern	A Sequence (list) of branch name patterns to ignore. Patterns are Golang style regular expressions. Optional.

Repo Config

Key	Description
repo	Name of GitHub repo in <org>/<name> format. Required.
noop	Branches may be deleted when set to false. Defaults to true.

OCI Image

OCI images are published to ghcr.io/jhoblitt/arborist.

Example docker run

$ docker run -ti -e GITHUB_TOKEN=$GITHUB_TOKEN -v $(pwd):$(pwd) -w $(pwd) ghcr.io/jhoblitt/arborist:latest

GitHub Action

A GitHub Action is available to help automatically maintain a healthy forest. See: jhoblitt/arborist-action