git-helpers

A few helpers for augmenting and prettifying existing git functionality.

These were written alongside other bash and python helpers that I may not have ported; let me know if you see anything missing or broken.

Setup

• source .git-rc from your .bashrc. This will give you lots of helpful aliases!
  • You might want to make sure it's not clobbering ones you already have/use.
  • It will also put several relevant directories from this repo on your $PATH
• pip install -r requirements.txt; currently just makes sure you have dateutil available, which some scripts here need. These dependencies are ones that should be available globally for git-helpers scripts to import, as opposed to e.g. living in a virtualenv.

"git branches" (git b)

I have this aliased to gb and it is one of my most commonly typed commands. It is basically a prettier and more useful version of git branch -vv.

Before:

After:

Things to note:

• It sorts branches in reverse-chron order of last modification, instead of alphabetically
• It has nice colors for each field
• It has quick, at-a-glance "# commits ahead" and "# commits behind"
• It shows abbreviated "time since last commit"

Related: "git remote-branches" (git br)

A cousin of git b is git br, which basically does the same thing for remote branches / git remote -v:

Before:

After:

Push Repository State to Remote: git copy-diffs (git cd)

I have this aliased to gcd and for some workflows use it very frequently.

git-cd pushes the state of your local repository to a "mirror" remote, preserving:

• existing branches / HEAD pointer, upstreams
• staged changes
• unstaged changes
• untracked (but not .gitignored) files

I've been shocked to not find support for this in git itself, or in any other tools people have written that solve versions of this problem. Common approaches (none of which do exactly what I want, or have undesired side-effects) are:

• commit all uncommitted changes, then push to remote.
  • optionally repeatedly amend the top commit and push -f that.
  • I want to preserve what is committed vs. staged vs. unstaged.
• rsync the entire directory
  • It's important to not push .gitignored files, as this will frequently contain compilation outputs and the like.
  • One approach would be to pipe e.g. the output of git ls-files to rsync in a way that rsync can digest.
    • This leaves out all the other state that git tracks; what branch you're on, what commits all branches are on, etc. I want these things copied too.

I've implemented it here in 3 steps:

1. rsync the entire .git directory
   • this gets you all branches, index state, commits, upstream info, etc.
2. git reset --hard HEAD
   • the first time you do step 1, you only have a .git directory and none of the files that git thinks should be there based on the contents of .git; this puts everything there, but blows away the uncommitted staged changes that were stored in .git/index.
3. rsync any unstaged, staged, and untracked (but not .gitignored) files, as well as .git/index
   • at this point all files in the "mirror" repository are equal to their counterparts in the source repo, and all .git state is equal as well.

Usage

Simply create a remote using the add-mirror-remote command:

$ git add-mirror-remote my-dev-box ryan@dev-box:path/to/repo

Then you can say:

$ git copy-diffs dev-box
$ gcd dev-box  # for short

And all of your state will be pushed to your remote, clobbering whatever was there previously.

As a shortcut, you can set environment variable $MIRROR_REMOTES to a comma-seperated list of remote names for git copy-diffs to look for by default:

$ export MIRROR_REMOTES=dev-box1,dev-box2
$ git copy-diffs  # will push to the first remote named dev-box1 or dev-box2 found in your "remotes" list

"g" wrapper for git

Self-explanatory! Who has time for that extra "it" all the time?

"rb": interactive rebase

Usage:

$ rb 10  # interactive rebase over the last 10 commits

Short for git rebase -i HEAD~<n>..HEAD, or interactive rebase over the last n commits.

git safe-push-force (git spf)

Typing git push -f is terrifying (rightly so)! Even when you know you're just force-pushing a feature branch that is ok to clobber, you are mere characters away from disaster.

git safe-push (a.k.a. g spf) will:

• try a non-force push
• if that fails, it will:
  • dry-run a force-push so that you can see what you're about to do,
  • tell you how many commits [what you're about to push] and [what you're about to overwrite] are away from one another,
  • ask whether you want to proceed,
  • if "Y" (default), then it will execute the push -f you've requested.

Sample output:

    # Inspect local branches; I have rearranged the order of the top two commits on `master`, and want to force-push that.
    $ gb
    * master 62a4888 origin/master +2 -2 18s 2014-09-08 15:03:57 some maven compile helpers
      test   4915c28 origin/master    -5  5d 2014-09-03 20:06:25 add `git-local-branches` helper

    # safe-push to the rescue!
    $ g spf master
    Safe-pushing master to origin/master (origin master)
    Non-fast-forward push? Dry-running -f: git push -f -n 'origin' 'master'
    To git@github.com:ryan-williams/bootstrap.git
     + 62f6ac4...62a4888 master -> master (forced update)

    	Merge base: 8479c0e
    	master: +2 commits
    	origin/master: +2 commits

    Continue? [Y/n]:
    git push -f 'origin' 'master'
    Counting objects: 10, done.
    Delta compression using up to 4 threads.
    Compressing objects: 100% (4/4), done.
    Writing objects: 100% (4/4), 521 bytes | 0 bytes/s, done.
    Total 4 (delta 2), reused 0 (delta 0)
    To git@github.com:ryan-williams/bootstrap.git
     + 62f6ac4...62a4888 master -> master (forced update)

It also has some handy refspec parsing, so all of the following are equivalent: $ g spf feature-branch ryan-feature-branch $ g spf origin feature-branch ryan-feature-branch $ g spf origin feature-branch:ryan-feature-branch $ g spf feature-branch:ryan-feature-branch

(if there is name ambiguity between a remote and a local branch, it will error out).

"g lg" (pretty git log -n)

I have this aliased to gln.

Before:

After:

Testing

./run-tests will run the bash and python tests in this repository, and is what Travis runs.

The python tests require some configuration to run locally:

virtualenv env
source env/bin/activate
pip -r requirements.dev.txt
nosetests

This is not necessary if you just want to use the scripts!