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:
- git-summary - Prints some summary info about the repo.
- git rename-branch - Renames a branch, both local and remote.
- git alias - Easy way to setup aliases for git commands.
- git ignore - Quickly add files to
.gitignore
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!