bd prune

Generated from bd help --doc prune

bd prune

Permanently delete closed non-ephemeral beads and their associated data.

Use this to trim closed regular beads (tasks, features, bugs, chores, etc.) that are no longer useful. The common case is a long-lived repo where closed work has piled up and is bloating auto-export or slowing queries.

Requires --older-than or --pattern. The flag is a safety gate — without it, a muscle-memory --force could wipe every closed bead in the repo. Use --pattern '*' if you really do want to sweep everything closed.

Deletes: issues, dependencies, labels, events, and comments for matching beads. Skips: pinned beads (protected), open/in-progress beads, and ephemeral beads.

Also skips closed beads whose ID appears in the description, notes, or comments of any open / in-progress bead. This protects ADR / decision / verification trails that downstream beads still cite. Use --ignore-references to override (e.g., when bulk-decommissioning a retired label across the rig).

To delete closed ephemeral beads (wisps, transient molecules) use bd purge instead.

For full Dolt storage reclaim after deleting many rows, follow with bd flatten so history can be collapsed and old chunks can be garbage-collected.

EXAMPLES: bd prune --older-than 30d # Preview closed beads >30d old bd prune --older-than 30d --force # Delete them bd prune --older-than 90d --dry-run # Detailed preview with stats bd prune --pattern "" --force # Delete all closed regular beads bd prune --pattern "gm-temp-" --force # Scope to a pattern

bd prune [flags]

Flags:

      --dry-run             Preview what would be pruned with stats
  -f, --force               Actually prune (without this, shows preview)
      --ignore-references   Delete closed beads even when referenced by open beads (use with care; see --help for details)
      --older-than string   Only prune beads closed more than N ago (e.g., 30d, 2w, 60)
      --pattern string      Only prune beads matching ID glob pattern (e.g., 'gm-old-*')