Archiving and deleting

Spaces accumulate. Archiving is how you clear them out without throwing anything away.

Archiving

Archiving parks a space: it leaves the sidebar and moves to the archive (⌘⇧A), along with its diff stats and, if it had a pull request, how that ended — merged, closed, or abandoned.

For a worktree space, archiving also reclaims the checkout from disk. That’s the point of it: worktrees are real directories, and a finished one is dead weight. The reclaim is lossless. Before removing the folder, Astra captures everything uncommitted and untracked to a side reference in the repo, so what survives is:

• the branch, with its commits,
• the full conversation,
• and any work in progress that was never committed.

Seeded files — the .env-style files Astra copied in when provisioning — are deliberately excluded. They’re config Astra owns, not work, and stashing them would write secrets into the object store and restore stale copies over fresh ones later.

Archiving a local space is just bookkeeping. There’s no separate checkout to reclaim, and your project folder is untouched.

Reopening

Reopening a worktree space re-creates the checkout — new worktree, seeds copied, setup command run — and restores the work in progress that was captured on archive. You get back the branch and the uncommitted changes exactly as they were, in a fresh, working copy.

The conversation comes back in full either way. It was never in the worktree; it’s in Astra’s own database.

Deleting

Deleting is permanent, and it means different things for the two kinds of space:

• Worktree space — the branch and anything uncommitted go with it. There’s no undo. If you’re not certain, archive instead: it costs nothing and keeps everything.
• Local space — only the conversation is removed. The files in your project folder stay exactly as they are. Astra never touches your repo root on delete.

Teardown commands

If a project needs something torn down before its worktree disappears — a container stopped, a port released — set a teardown command in the project’s settings. It runs in the worktree just before the folder is removed, on archive or delete. See Project setup.