git bash - deleted local branches

You can find out which branches have been merged into a branch by running the below:

$ git branch --merged origin/master

* master

  feature/some-branch

  feature/some-other-branch

This will also print out master as part of it, so we can then pipe that into grep to match results without master:

$ git branch --merged origin/master | grep -v master

  feature/some-branch

  feature/some-other-branch

Obviously, you won't want the name master in your branch name, otherwise it'll be excluded too. You can fancier with regex here.

Now we can take this result and pipe it into xargs, to run git branch -d passing the output as arguments

$ git branch --merged origin/master

  | grep -v master

  | xargs -r git branch -d

I'm splitting up the command onto separate lines for readability. The -r will only run the git command if there is output.

I've noticed this doesn't always delete all old branches, but it can help. For example, perhaps you had a branch that was a work in progress, or a spike, with changes that aren't merged - this won't be picked up.

You can do one more trick to detect old branches that have no upstream branch anymore:

$ git branch -vv

This will list branches without an upstream branch with gone. Those can generally be deleted too.

Today I learned - VSTS CLI and jq

Today I learned about the VSTS command line tool from a colleague.

I might actually have heard about it before, but wasn't able to try it out because I was previously using the on-premise TFS and not the cloud based VSTS, but hey, today I tried it out :)

For example, you can query VSTS for pull requests you've created by doing the following:

$ cd /your-vsts-git-repo
$ vsts login
$ vsts code pr list --creator "James Barrow"

This will return a JSON object containing info about what pull requests you have created.

If you don't really care about the entire structure, you can then use another command line tool I've come across before called jq.

For example, if you only care about the title, status and url of the pull request, you could do the following:

$ vsts code pr list --creator "James Barrow" | jq ".[] | { title, status, url }"

That's a long command, but what it basically does is pipes the JSON result into jq, which parses it by taking each element in the array of the result, and then filtering it to only take the title, status and url properties of each item in the array.

And finally, since we all know the best way to use git is via the command line and git bash, you can then also create a bash alias in your ~/.bashrc file:

alias prs='vsts code pr list --creator "James Barrow" | jq ".[] | {title,status,url}"'

So you can just check for your pull requests now by simply running:

$ prs
{
  "title": "RE #1234 - some pull request",
  "status": "active",
  "url": "https://blah.visualstudio.com/.../pullRequests/2345"
}

Which gives you something like that ;)

Much simpler than having to open up Chrome, go to VSTS, find the right tab for pull requests, etc...

I want to dig more into using jq to pull out info on if the pull requests have had votes as well, so I can just run a command from my command line and see if I need to follow up on a PR or not, but this will have to wait for another day :)

One last note is that use of single and double quotes might be important depending on your shell of choice, so keep that in mind too.

Hope this helped someone.

UPDATE: There is also vsts code pr list -o table which prints a nice format

git-run for managing many repositories

Some may make use of a monorepo, for example over there at Google, however for those of us that don't and have to deal with multiple repositories, possibly unrelated ones across various projects, then a great tool to have in your toolbelt is git-run, or just gr.

It can keep track of where your repositories are located, and can also be used to tag the various repositories. You can then run a git command across all of these repositories (or based on a tag).

To set it up:

$ npm install -g git-run
$ git tag discover PATH

One way I have been using that is to create a tag per project, so across a project which may have many repositories, I can see my git status across all of those by executing:

$ gr @project status

It can also run normal shell commands as well

$ gr @project cat package.json

One thing I realised it didn't do in my git bash shell, was run my aliases that I tend to use (e.g. I have a complicated bash alias for a git log command). But luckily someone else has already got an open pull request to fix this (at least for bash), which suited my needs. Yay for open source!

Try it out and let me know what you think :)

Update: I also recently discovered when trying it on a new computer - make sure you don't forget to add tags to the repositories it discovers during gr tag discover, because it won't save its configuration and you'll get an error.

bash startup files and aliases

Today I hosted a Beer and Tech session at Entelect on Automating Database Deployments (with Flyway).

During the session, I was using the Bash terminal to edit files or run Flyway, and interacting with git quite a bit - as we all know, using git on the command line is the best way to do so ;D

After the session, a colleague asked me how I created shortcuts for certain commands, and I explained to him how Bash supports aliases and that these can be loaded by a startup file. There are various startup files, but I tend to use ~/.bash_profile and not ~/.bashrc. Here are some of the shortcuts I currently have setup:

alias cls='clear'
alias l='ls -Al'
alias ..='cd ..'

alias gf='git fetch --prune'
alias gl='git log --name-status --abbrev-commit'
alias grh='git reset --hard'
alias gs='git status'

And so on. If you modify the file, you have to re-load these into the current session, or restart a new terminal session. To reload the file, you can just do the following:

$ . ~/.bash_profile

Hope this helped someone :)