Branch retention

Branches that have no activity after a certain number of days are automatically marked as Inactive and then later automatically Closed. When branches are not deployed to the main branch and are closed, their resources get deleted in a process known as "de-indexing" to reduce the cost of branches.

If one of your branches has been marked as Inactive, you will receive both an email notification and a notification in Foundry. You can view branches marked as Inactive in the Branches tab of the Foundry Branching application and in your individual branch view.

To move the branch back into the Active status, you can choose from either of the following options:

• Manually remove the Inactive label on the branch. You can only do this if you are the owner of that branch.
• Continue work on your branched resources and deploy changes or additions to your branch. The branch status will update in the background automatically. This change can be as simple as changing the name of the branch itself.

You can set the durations after which branches are considered inactive, and at what point the branch should automatically get closed in Control Panel. Navigate to Control Panel > Spaces > Actions > Foundry branch retention policy to view and edit the configurations under the Spaces section.

By default, these values are set at 7 days. Foundry Branching runs a retention task every hour to determine what actions to take on branches that qualify for retention actions.

The possible set of actions that can be automatically applied to branches are as follows. Branches can automatically be:

1. Marked as Inactive after seven days of no changes to an Active branch.
2. Marked as Active again if changes are observed on an Inactive branch.
3. Marked as Closed after seven days of no changes to an Inactive branch.

Once a branch is Closed, it is not possible to reopen it, so this is the terminal state for the user. Seven days after a branch has been in the Closed or Deployed state, its leftover data will be deleted by jobs running in foundry-retention.