katazuke (pronounced kah-tah-zoo-keh) is a Japanese term meaning "tidying up" or "putting things in order."

A developer workspace maintenance tool that helps you keep your ~/projects directory clean and organized by managing stale branches, archived repositories, and out-of-date checkouts.

As developers, our project directories accumulate clutter over time:

• Merged branches that were never cleaned up
• Archived repositories still taking up space
• Non-git directories that don't belong
• Stale local checkouts needing updates
• Abandoned branches languishing locally and remotely

katazuke automates the discovery and cleanup of these issues, helping you maintain a tidy development workspace with confidence.

This tool is opinionated and designed for a specific PR-based workflow:

• You work on feature branches (graham/<short-name> for private repos, <short-name> for OSS forks)
• You open PRs, merge them, and remote branches auto-delete
• You forget to clean up local branches, leaving dozens of stale branches cluttering your workspace

If this sounds familiar, katazuke will help. If your workflow differs significantly, this tool may not be the right fit. See Workflow Context for details.

brew tap agrahamlincoln/katazuke
brew install katazuke

The packaging/PKGBUILD in this repository is the canonical pacman build definition. Releases are built with tatara, a private packaging tool. To build from source manually:

cd packaging
makepkg -si

Note: This is a personal package, not published to the official AUR.

• Branch Cleanup: Identify and remove merged branches across all repos
• Archive Detection: Find and remove archived/defunct repository checkouts via GitHub API
• Directory Audit: Detect non-git directories in your projects folder with size/content summary
• Sync Automation: Keep repositories up-to-date with smart conflict detection
• Safe Operations: Interactive prompts with justification before any deletion, dry-run mode
• Configuration: YAML config file with environment variable overrides

Planned:

• Stale branch detection (abandoned branches with no recent commits)

# Clean up merged branches across all repos
katazuke branches --merged

# Remove archived GitHub repository checkouts
katazuke repos --archived

# Find non-git directories in your projects folder
katazuke audit --non-git

# Sync all repositories (fetch + pull)
katazuke sync

# Sync only repos matching a pattern
katazuke sync --pattern "*kafka*"

# Preview what would happen without making changes
katazuke branches --merged --dry-run

• --dry-run / -n: Show what would be done without making changes
• --verbose / -v: Enable debug logging
• --projects-dir / -p: Override the projects directory (default: ~/projects)

katazuke looks for a config file at $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/katazuke/config.yaml (or ~/.config/katazuke/config.yaml).

projects_dir: ~/projects
stale_threshold_days: 30
exclude_patterns:
  - ".archive"
  - "vendor"
sync:
  strategy: rebase    # rebase, merge, or ff-only
  skip_dirty: false
  auto_stash: true

All options can be overridden via environment variables prefixed with KATAZUKE_ (e.g., KATAZUKE_SYNC_STRATEGY=ff-only). GitHub authentication uses gh CLI config, or falls back to GITHUB_TOKEN / GH_TOKEN.

katazuke is designed around a specific contributor workflow. Understanding this context helps explain design decisions and feature priorities.

All repository checkouts live in a flat directory structure at ~/projects by default:

~/projects/
├── repo1/
├── repo2/
├── some-library/
└── client-project/

While katazuke defaults to ~/projects, it supports:

• Configurable root paths (e.g., ~/my-gitstuff, /var/cache/all/my/checkouts)
• Arbitrary grouped structures using .katazuke index files as boundary markers

How .katazuke works:

• If ~/projects/.katazuke exists → scan according to its groups and ignores lists
• If a group like ~/projects/work/.katazuke exists → that group has its own nested organization
• If no .katazuke exists in a directory → assume its immediate children are repositories
• This allows unlimited depth while keeping scans efficient and predictable

.katazuke format (YAML or JSON):

groups:
  - work
  - oss
ignores:
  - archive
  - tmp

Example grouped structure:

~/projects/
├── .katazuke             # Defines groups and ignores
├── work/
│   ├── .katazuke         # groups: [client-a, client-b]
│   ├── client-a/
│   │   ├── repo1/
│   │   └── repo2/
│   └── client-b/
│       └── repo3/
├── oss/
│   ├── project1/
│   └── project2/
└── archive/              # Ignored

1. Clone the repository
2. Create a feature branch: graham/<short-name>
3. Commit changes and push to remote
4. Open a PR against main
5. Merge the PR (GitHub auto-deletes the remote branch via "Automatically delete head branches")
6. Forget to delete the local branch ⬅️ This is the problem

Over time, this accumulates dozens of local branches with short, context-free names that made sense during development but are meaningless weeks later.

1. Fork the upstream repository
2. Clone your fork locally
3. Add the source repository as upstream remote
4. Create feature branches: <short-name> (not graham/<name>, to protect the default branch)
5. Push to your fork (origin)
6. Open a PR against upstream
7. After merge: Forget to clean up local branch, fork's remote branch, and sync fork's main with upstream ⬅️ More problems

This workflow can leave 50+ stale branches across local checkouts and forks, making it difficult to understand what work is in-progress versus abandoned.

katazuke is intentionally opinionated and tailored to this workflow. It is not designed to accommodate all developer patterns or workflows. Contributions that add flags or options for alternative workflows may be rejected if they conflict with the core use case.

The tool is also defensive by design: it detects when your actual workflow has deviated from these patterns and avoids destructive actions that could disrupt your work.

Build and development tasks are managed with just:

just setup        # Check dependencies
just build        # Build for local platform
just test         # Run unit tests
just test-e2e     # Run end-to-end tests
just lint         # Run golangci-lint
just release VER  # Full release automation
just --list       # See all available commands

MIT