How to use bash completion for your own git aliases

22.07.2020 | Johannes Kastl in howto

If you are like me, you will likely work on several different projects on a daily basis - and all of them will be stored in git.

Sure, git is easy to use. But typing the same set of commands multiple times, every day, can be quite annoying. Fortunately, using bash and git together allows to create some user-defined shortcuts.

Bash aliases

Ever wondered why ll spits out something sensible on your distribution, but not on others? Even though there is no executable called ll?

Bash allows the user (or your distribution) to set what is called an “alias”. By defining what should be done when the user types in ll, bash knows what to do and just executes this.

For the ll example, this is done using a line like the following:

alias ll='ls -lh'

So by typing ll, what you are really executing is ls -l. And when typing ll <TAB> (ll followed by a space and the tab key) you get all the nice bash completion features that are available when using ls directly.

Of course, this does not only work for ls but also for other things. Like git…

Defining git aliases

When your bash is started, some files are being read and all settings used for your current shell session. Depending on which type of shell is being started (login shell?), this can be ~/.profile, ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bashrc. The exact order should be similar on all distributions, however some distributions seem to mess with this. I will go into some more detail about this in another blogpost. To make sure your efforts won’t be useless, add a line like echo "I am being executed" to each of these files, and check which ones are being read.

After you found out which file to use, add the lines from the example file dot_bashrc to your file (shown here without comments):

This line will tell your bash to look for a file called .alias in your home directory.

The example file contains a whole range of aliases. Of course, you can also put those into ~/.profile or ~/.bash_profile or maybe even somewhere in /etc/ if you want to set this for all your users on the system.

As you can see, we can define lots of aliases, that come in handy during daily work. Adding files, committing, switching branches, checking out new branches, all of this is just some keys away:

Easy, isn’t it?

(For those of you who are not familiar with git, I have created a new branch and a new file, committed this file and pushed my changes to my remote).

*** Also, during rebasing the greim, grea or grec aliases are very useful. Because rebasing is extremely powerful and extremely dangerous to get wrong (not for the faint of heart), we will go into detail in a later blogpost. ***

So, you can define bash aliases yourself and make them do whatever you want. Nice, eh?

More complex git aliases

A second place where you can define aliases is gits’ own configuration file ~/.gitconfig. This allows you to either use the bash alias g (for git status) or use a short form with plain git, like git st.

The example file contains some of my git aliases.

[alias]
        st = status
        ci = commit
        co = checkout
        br = branch -vv
        fs = !git fetch --all && git status && git merge --ff-only
        fe = fetch --all
        pl = pull
        ps = push
        re = rebase
        cp = cherry-pick
        lol = log --oneline --graph --decorate
        lg = log --color --graph --pretty=format:'%Cred%h%Creset -%C(yellow)%d%Creset %s %Cgreen(%cr) %C(bold blue)<%an>%Creset' --abbrev-commit --

You might note that some are just abbreviations of normal git commands, while others look strange. What’s with the exclamation mark for fs? And what is all that stuff for lg? Actually both are really simple and really useful…

git fs does not just call for one git command, but rather runs a sequence of bash commands. I use this alias a lot in projects only I am working on, when using multiple branches is just to much of a hassle. Not using guit pull but rather git fs prevents you from having lots of merge commits, if your local branches are behind origin/master but you already made commits. Rebase comes in handy here.

git lg (or glg if you use the bash alias) allows you to have a very detailed yet easy-to-understand overview of your current branches history. It shows all commits in reverse-chronological order, including branches!

Bash completion for your own aliases

So, we have created bash aliases and git aliases, but where is that tab completion thingy I talked about?

The dot_bashrc example file not only contains the instructions to read the aliases from ~/.alias, but also this part:

First, we check if the git.sh file, provided by the git or git-core package, is existing on our system. Please note that the path to this file will differ, depending on your distribution. Usually, a command like rpm -ql git-core|grep bash or dpkg -L git|grep bash will do the trick.

After that we make bash read that file (using the . syntax, which is equivalent to source). Once all those git bash completion things are available, we tell bash which alias should use which type of bash completion. ga adds files to the index, so it should use the same bash completion as git add, while gbrd is used for deleting branches and should only autocomplete branch names.

Note that not every alias needs auto-completion. So things like gf (aka git fs) are not mentioned here.

And now for something completely different

Basically, this is all you need to do to get aliases working. But it is not all you can do. In a second blogpost, I will show how to make the bash prompt show some git information, like which branch you own or if you have modified files or a saved stash. Until then, have fun with aliases!

Example files

Johannes Kastl
Johannes Kastl
Johannes is a Linux trainer and consultant and has been with B1 Systems since 2017. His topics include configuration management (Ansible, Salt, Chef, Puppet), version control (git), Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) and automation (Jenkins) as well as testing (Inspec, anyone?). At daytime he works as a sysadmin and fixes problems, at night he tries new technologies like Kubernetes (openSUSE Kubic!), podman or transactional-updates.

 

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