Aliases

Goals

  • Learn how to setup aliases and shortcuts for git commands

Common Aliases

git status, git add, git commit, and git checkout are such common commands that it is useful to have abbreviations for them.

Add the following to the .gitconfig file in your $HOME directory.

.gitconfig

  1. [alias]
  2.   co = checkout
  3.   ci = commit
  4.   st = status
  5.   br = branch
  6.   hist = log --pretty=format:'%h %ad | %s%d [%an]' --graph --date=short
  7.   type = cat-file -t
  8.   dump = cat-file -p

We’ve covered the commit and status commands already. And we just covered the log command in the previous lab. The checkout command will be coming up soon.

With these aliases defined in the .gitconfig file you can type git co wherever you used to have to type git checkout. Likewise with git st for git status and git ci for git commit. And best of all, git hist will allow you to avoid the really long log command.

Go ahead and give the new commands a try.

Define the hist alias in your .gitconfig file

For the most part, I will continue to type out the full command in these instructions. The only exception is that I will use the hist alias defined above anytime we need to see the git log output. Make sure you have a hist alias setup in your .gitconfig file before continuing if you wish to follow along.

Type and Dump

We’ve added a few aliases for commands we haven’t covered yet. The git branch command will be coming up soon. And the git cat-file command is useful for exploring git, which we will see in a little while.

Shell Aliases (Optional)

Note: This section is for folks running a posix-like shell. Windows users and other non-posix shell users can feel free to skip to the next lab.

If your shell supports aliases or shortcuts, then you can add aliases at that level too. Here are the ones I use:

.profile

  1. alias gs='git status '
  2. alias ga='git add '
  3. alias gb='git branch '
  4. alias gc='git commit'
  5. alias gd='git diff'
  6. alias gco='git checkout '
  7. alias gk='gitk --all&'
  8. alias gx='gitx --all'
  10. alias got='git '
  11. alias get='git '

The gco abbreviation for git checkout is particularly nice. It allows me to type:

  1. gco <branch>

to checkout a particular branch.

And yes, I do mistype git as get or got often enough to create aliases for them.