Include my Git Aliases

I’m a big fan of Git aliases as a means of improving your developer workflow when using Git. They are great for automating common tasks. They also can help make sense of the byzantine set of options Git has.

Alias TV show cast

So far, I’ve written a few blog posts with helpful aliases.

It’s wonderful to see all these aliases out there, but it’s a bit tedious to copy and paste all these aliases from all these sources into your .gitconfig file. It’s like going on a wild goose chase for a Rambaldi device. I’m here to reduce the tedium in your life.

Git Config Includes

In Git 1.7.10 and later, you can add an include section to your Git config file with a path to another file that includes config settings. For example, if someone were to…say…publish a file with just their Git aliases named .gitconfig.aliases. You could copy that file to your home directory and reference it in your .gitconfig like so:

[include]
    path = ~/.gitconfig.aliases

Now who in the world is so kind to include all their Git aliases in a single file you ask? Me. I’m that person.

A common pattern on GitHub is for people to publish their configuration settings in a repository on GitHub named dotfiles. For example, here’s my haacked/dotfiles repository. I wasn’t the one to come up with this idea. I copied holman/dotfiles who wrote a whole post suggesting that Dotfiles are Meant to be Forked.

You can find all my aliases (and just my aliases) in a file named .gitconfig.aliases. This way, you can add my aliases without having to adopt any of my other peculiar Git settings.

Installation

But before you start cloning repositories and editing config files, I made an even simpler way to obtain my aliases - just run the following commands in your shell.

curl -o ~/.gitconfig.aliases https://raw.githubusercontent.com/haacked/dotfiles/main/git/gitconfig.aliases.symlink
git config --global include.path "~/.gitconfig.aliases"

The first command downloads my .gitconfig.aliases file into your home directory (aka ~/). The second command adds an include pointing to this file.

WARNING: If you already have an include section in your .gitconfig file, the previous command will overwrite it. In that case, just edit your include section and add another path property with the path to the gitconfig.aliases file.

From now on, when I blog a new Git alias, I’ll be sure to add it to that file and remind you how to install it.

Comments

5 responses

Ken Bonny • February 15th, 2019
Can I use the aliases in powershell or do I need bash?
Jamie Cansdale • February 15th, 2019
Do you have any tips for managing dotfiles on Windows?
Jason McLeod • February 15th, 2019
Good collection of aliases. Some of the ones that interact with Github like the pull request assume that you are using a https clone url over git.
haacked • February 17th, 2019
@Ken Some of them might need tweaking because of the difference in how PowerShell handles quoting, but most of them should work. I think the ones that use “sed” won’t work because that’s not included with Git.

@Jamie Nothing specific other than put them in a repository and write some scripts to pull them to the right place.

@Jason that’s exactly right. It’s what I recommend doing. I could probably make it work for SSH too, but I got lazy. :P
Ashe • February 18th, 2019
I use the following trick to generate shell aliases for all defined git aliases, such that every one works without git before it. It sounds like a small bonus, but I use these commands tens to hundreds of times a day, and find the added fluency really helpful.

fish:

git config –list perl -lne ‘/^alias./ and print “alias $1="git\ $1"”’ source

bash:

eval “$(git config –list perl -lne ‘/^alias./ and print “alias $1=git\ $1”’)”

This is probably a bad idea if git aliases have names that overlap with actual commands (like find, history, cp), but can be helpful if you don’t.