Chris Pedro

Just a guy from Bermuda

Git Hacks

Last Updated: 2019-03-13

Git is by the far the de-facto standard for version control, but out of box it lacks a lot of tools that make it easier to work with. I’ve built quite a range of aliases and separate scripts to help with every day use. Here’s a collection. of some of them.

Use Most instead of Less or More

Not specifically Git related, but I would recommend using most as your default pager instead of more or less. It shows syntax highlighting, which is more than handy. You can install it using the package manager of your distro if you’re running Linux, or via Homebrew on macOS. Just install it, and set your $PAGER environment variable to its path.

$ echo "export PAGER='/usr/local/bin/most'" >> ~/.bash_profile
$ export PAGER='/usr/local/bin/most'
$ echo $PAGER
/usr/local/bin/most

Useful Git Aliases

Quick discard all changes on a file

$ git config --global alias.discard 'checkout --'
$ git discard <file>

Un-stage a file.

$ git config --global alias.unstage 'reset HEAD --'
$ git unstage <file>

Show last commit log

$ git config --global alias.last 'log -1 HEAD'
$ git last

Show all commits, in a nice format

$ git config --global alias.log-all 'log --oneline --decorate --graph --all'
$ git log-all

Show all commits, but more verbose that log-all.

$ git config --global alias.log-full 'log --pretty=medium --decorate --all --stat'
$ git log-full

Turning On/Off GPG Signing

Like a good GitHub user, I always sign my commits. However, there’s a lot of work repos that I don’t need to / want to sign. So I find myself turning on and off GPG signing. To help with this, I’ve written two Bash aliases that get loaded in my .bash_profile. That way, I can run git-sign to turn on signing, and git-nosign to turn it off.

alias git-sign='git config --global commit.gpgsign true'
alias git-nosign='git config --global commit.gpgsign false'

Git References Script

There’s a number of repositories that have multiple refs, and it’s a bit hard to keep track of what state each is at. I can run the git log-all or git log-full from above, but I also wrote a Bash script that uses the for-each-ref command to print them all out, with some basic information.

#!/bin/bash
# File: git-refs

printf "\e[1;34m${PWD}\e[0m"

fmt='
%(color:bold cyan)%(refname:short)%(color:reset):
  Commit:    %(color:yellow)%(objectname)%(color:reset)
  Date:      %(committerdate:format:%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S)
  Committer: %(committername) %(committeremail)'

git for-each-ref --sort=-committerdate --format="$fmt" refs

Sample output:

$ git-refs
/path/to/test
origin/master:
  Commit:    c1814782ddfcc5492ca9beff44801584313025b3
  Date:      2018-10-15 19:48:53
  Committer: Chris Pedro <chris@thepedros.com>

origin/HEAD:
  Commit:    c1814782ddfcc5492ca9beff44801584313025b3
  Date:      2018-10-15 19:48:53
  Committer: Chris Pedro <chris@thepedros.com>

GitLab/master:
  Commit:    c1814782ddfcc5492ca9beff44801584313025b3
  Date:      2018-10-15 19:48:53
  Committer: Chris Pedro <chris@thepedros.com>

GitHub/master:
  Commit:    c1814782ddfcc5492ca9beff44801584313025b3
  Date:      2018-10-15 19:48:53
  Committer: Chris Pedro <chris@thepedros.com>

master:
  Commit:    c1814782ddfcc5492ca9beff44801584313025b3
  Date:      2018-10-15 19:48:53
  Committer: Chris Pedro <chris@thepedros.com>

Setting Up Multiple Remote Repos

Normally, you’ll only have one remote repo, but this may not always be the case. For example, I push all my personal public repos to GitHub and GitLab, because why keep all your eggs in one basket? I could just use git remote commands to set up multiple remote repos, but I found it way easier to just edit the .git/config file in the repo itself. Doing this also allows you to set two URLs for the ‘origin’ repo, which means anytime you push or pull to ‘origin’, you’ll be pushing or pulling to or from both URLs. This means, for example, you simply do a git push origin master and have the repo synced up to all remote repos in one go.

First, backup up your config in case anything goes wrong, then open .git/config using your favourite text editor, and add all the remote repos using the format below. The <REMOTE> on the first and last line much match.

[remote "<REMOTE>"]
	url = <REMOTE_URL>
	fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/<REMOTE>/*

Next, edit the [remote "origin"] directive and simply add the same url = line you did above. You can specify as many URLs as you wish all will be used when doing a push.

As an example, below is the config I use for this projects repo. As you can see, I have a “GitHub” and “GitLab” remote repo named, and both URLs are under “origin”. Each time I run git push origin master, both remote repos are updated. Also, I can pull or push to each individually by running git pull GitHub master or git pull GitLab master for example. Also, running git fetch --all will run a ‘fetch’ on both remote repos.

[core]
	repositoryformatversion = 0
	filemode = true
	bare = false
	logallrefupdates = true
	ignorecase = true
	precomposeunicode = true
[remote "origin"]
	url = git@github.com:cpedro/cpedro.github.io.git
	url = git@gitlab.com:cpedro/cpedro.github.io.git
	fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
[branch "master"]
	remote = origin
	merge = refs/heads/master
[remote "GitLab"]
	url = git@gitlab.com:cpedro/cpedro.github.io.git
	fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/GitLab/*
[remote "GitHub"]
	url = git@github.com:cpedro/cpedro.github.io.git
	fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/GitHub/*