How to get the current branch name in Git?

Question

I\'m from a Subversion background and, when I had a branch, I knew what I was working on with \"These working files point to this branch\".

But with Git I\'m not sur

Answer 1

You can permanently set up your bash output to show your git-branch name. It is very handy when you work with different branches, no need to type $ git status all the time. Github repo git-aware-prompt .

Open your terminal (ctrl-alt-t) and enter the commands

mkdir ~/.bash
cd ~/.bash
git clone git://github.com/jimeh/git-aware-prompt.git

Edit your .bashrc with sudo nano ~/.bashrc command (for Ubuntu) and add the following to the top:

export GITAWAREPROMPT=~/.bash/git-aware-prompt
source "${GITAWAREPROMPT}/main.sh"

Then paste the code

export PS1="\${debian_chroot:+(\$debian_chroot)}\[\033[01;32m\]\u@\h\[\033[00m\]:\[\033[01;34m\]\w\[\033[00m\] \[$txtcyn\]\$git_branch\[$txtred\]\$git_dirty\[$txtrst\]\$ "

at the end of the same file you pasted the installation code into earlier. This will give you the colorized output:

Answer 2

git branch

should show all the local branches of your repo. The starred branch is your current branch.

If you want to retrieve only the name of the branch you are on, you can do:

git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD

or with Git 2.22 and above:

git branch --show-current

Answer 3

you can also use GIT_BRANCH variable as appears here: https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Git+Plugin

The git plugin sets several environment variables you can use in your scripts:

GIT_COMMIT - SHA of the current

GIT_BRANCH - Name of the branch currently being used, e.g. "master" or "origin/foo"

GIT_PREVIOUS_COMMIT - SHA of the previous built commit from the same branch (the current SHA on first build in branch)

GIT_URL - Repository remote URL

GIT_URL_N - Repository remote URLs when there are more than 1 remotes, e.g. GIT_URL_1, GIT_URL_2

GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL - Committer/Author Email

GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL - Committer/Author Email

Answer 4

You can just type in command line (console) on Linux, in the repository directory:

$ git status

and you will see some text, among which something similar to:

...
On branch master
...

which means you are currently on master branch. If you are editing any file at that moment and it is located in the same local repository (local directory containing the files that are under Git version control management), you are editing file in this branch.

Answer 5

git symbolic-ref -q --short HEAD

I use this in scripts that need the current branch name. It will show you the current short symbolic reference to HEAD, which will be your current branch name.

Answer 6

What about this?

{ git symbolic-ref HEAD 2> /dev/null || git rev-parse --short HEAD 2> /dev/null } | sed "s#refs/heads/##"