Finding what branch a Git commit came from

Question

Is there a way to find out what branch a commit comes from given its SHA-1 hash value?

Bonus points if you can tell me how to accomplish this using Ruby Grit.

Answer 1

A poor man's option is to use the tool tig¹ on HEAD, search for the commit, and then visually follow the line from that commit back up until a merge commit is seen. The default merge message should specify what branch is getting merged to where :)

¹ Tig is an ncurses-based text-mode interface for Git. It functions mainly as a Git repository browser, but it can also assist in staging changes for commit at chunk level and act as a pager for output from various Git commands.