[rishitank]

Why

Merged PR branches pile up. GitHub has no account-wide setting to delete them: "Automatically delete head branches" is a per-repository toggle, and it deletes every merged head branch with no exceptions. Private repositories on the Free plan can't protect branches, so that toggle could delete a long-lived branch such as develop the first time it is merged as a PR head.

This workflow does the cleanup with an explicit allowlist instead.

What changed

• New .github/workflows/branch-cleanup.yml. Self-contained, no reusable workflow (rishitank/.github main is ruleset-blocked, so a shared copy can't land yet).
  • Trigger: pull_request closed. The one job runs only when the PR was merged and its head is in this repository (never a fork's branch).
  • Keeps the head branch, with a ::notice::, when it is the default branch, or one of main, master, develop, staging, test, gh-pages, deploy-*, release/*, or when any open PR still uses it as its base.
  • Otherwise deletes it with gh api -X DELETE repos/$REPO/git/refs/heads/<ref>, the ref URL-encoded with jq @uri. "Reference does not exist" (422) or a 404 counts as success, since the branch is already gone.
  • Permissions: workflow default {}; the job gets contents: write (delete the ref) and pull-requests: read (the open-PR check). timeout-minutes: 2.
  • No ${{ }} in run:. Every event value reaches the shell through env: and is quoted.
• Checked locally: actionlint and shellcheck are clean. The script was run against a stub gh for the default branch, each allowlisted name, a branch with open child PRs, a ref containing /, a space and #, an already-deleted ref (422 and 404), and a 403, which fails the job.
• The live proof is ci: delete a PR's head branch after it merges, with an allowlist test#15: merging it should delete its own ci/branch-cleanup branch.

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https://claude.ai/code/session_012rYJxu978iUSGFZ1UuqTsi

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• .github/workflows/branch-cleanup.yml

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[rishitank]

Closing as redundant. Merged branches are now handled account-wide by the nightly branch-prune workflow in rishitank/.github (it also switches on Automatically delete head branches for every repository), so a per-repository workflow isn't needed and would spend Actions minutes in private repositories. Closed, not merged; the branch is left in place.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code