Git Extras


I use Git every day. I’m pretty comfortable using it from the command line, but there’s a lot of advanced things that I just can’t remember how to do off the top of my head. There’s also a lot of command sequences that I type over and over. I recently came across the Git Extras project that provides a lot of useful plugins for Git that make using it a little less tedious.

One of the commands I think will be useful is git feature.

How to use it

$ git feature git-extras-post -r
Total 0 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)
To mygitserver/pitman.bz.git
 * [new branch]      HEAD -> feature/git-extras-post
Branch feature/git-extras-post set up to track remote branch feature/git-extras-post from origin.
Switched to a new branch 'feature/git-extras-post'

The -r option tells it to setup a remote tracking branch and since I didn’t pass a remote name, it defaults to origin. So, the first thing it did was push a branch to origin. Then it fetched from origin and created a local branch setup to track to the same branch name at origin and checked it out.

How to finish out your feature branch

After completing my work in this branch, I would use a similar command to finish:

$ git checkout master
Switched to branch 'master'
Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/master'.
$ git feature finish git-extras-post
Already up-to-date.
Deleted branch feature/git-extras-post (was 055ade6).
Deleted remote-tracking branch origin/feature/git-extras-post (was 055ade6).
To mygitserver/pitman.bz.git
 - [deleted]         feature/git-extras-post

First, I switched to the master branch. Then the feature finish command did a no-ff merge into the current branch (master) and deleted the feature/git-extras-post branch. It then deleted the remote branch.

Is this earth-shattering? No, not really. But I like the way it automates some of the workflow that I already use.

Other Commands

There’s a lot of other neat commands too:

There’s many more listed in the repo.

Contributing

The maintainers are pretty friendly. I submitted a pull request to fix the remote handling of the git feature command and after some code review, and a few changes, it was merged quickly.

Is there a Git workflow you use that you think others would benefit from? Fork the Git Extras repo and submit a pull request!

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