Most useful aliases for git

Hello everyone! In this article, I'll share with you some useful aliases for git that I use every day.

Working with branches

For each feature I work on, I create a new branch, this alias saves me a lot of time:

gco

This is an alias for

git checkout

Usage

gco branch-name // switch to branch an existing branch
gco -b branch-name // create a new branch and switch to it
gco . // discard all changes in the working directory

Commits

Every day I create a lot of commits, each time type git commit is boring, so I use these aliases:

gcmsg

This is an alias for

git commit -m

Usage

gcmsg 'feat: commit text' // create new commit

gca

This is an alias for

git commit --amend

gcfix

This is an alias for

git commit --fixup

Usage

gcfix commit_hash // create a fixup commit for commit with provided hash

Rebasing

When you work on a large project, rebasing is part of your everyday routine, so this alias will save you some time of typing

gpr

This is an alias for

git pull --rebase origin dev // remote and branch may be different in your case

Also often I need to rename, remove some commits or squash fixups in my local branch, for this I use this alias:

gria

git rebase -i --autosquash

Usage

gria HEAD~4 // interactively change last 4 commits

Pushing

After I've created some commits I need to push them, for that I use next:

ggp

git push origin $(current_branch) // instead of origin you can use your own remote

What is $(current_branch) ? It's an function that returns name of current branch, It looks like that:

function current_branch() {
    ref=$(git symbolic-ref HEAD 2> /dev/null) || return
    echo ${ref#refs/heads/}
}

How to keep aliases

If you just type in terminal command

alias gs="git status"

it will work, but when you restart the terminal it will not.

For fix that I keep all my aliases in file ~/.bash_aliases and import them in my ~/.bash_profile like that:

if [ -f ~/.bash_aliases ]; then
  . ~/.bash_aliases
fi

My ~/.bash_aliases looks like that:

function current_branch() {
  ref=$(git symbolic-ref HEAD 2> /dev/null) || return
  echo ${ref#refs/heads/}
}

alias ~="cd ~";
alias ..="cd .."
alias g="git"
alias gs="git status"
alias gc="git commit"
alias gcmsg="git commit -m"
alias gcfix="git commit --fixup"
alias gria="git rebase -i --autosquash"
alias gca="git commit --amend"
alias gco="git checkout"
alias gb="git branch"
alias gpr="git pull --rebase origin dev"
alias gp="git pull"
alias ggp="git push origin $(current_branch)"

Thank you for reading

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I'll glad to see any feedback!

Comments

[Vishal Raj]

@paulcodes Wouldn't it be better to create git aliases instead of bash aliases? My personal choice is to have git aliases.

[Paul Golubkov]

Hi! Good question! Yes, you can use git aliases, it's not a bad choice. I prefer use bash aliases instead because I also have other type of aliases, so I like to have one place for all of them. And how you can see in the article I use bash script for getting current_branch name and use it in my aliases, I think it's not posible in git aliases.

And bash aliases are shorter :)