Git pull multiple repositories at once

Update: I wrote about another approach to achieve this and some extras, with git submodules. You can find it here here.

I usually work with many repos at the same time and generally group them within a same directory, named after the company.

In example, if I'm working for "Great Employer INC." I'll have a directory probably named greatemployerinc and one directory for each repo I work within. Something like:

greatemployerinc
├── greatemployerinc-web
├── greatemployerinc-auth
├── greatemployerinc-core-service
├── greatemployerinc-email-service
├── ...more repos
└── greatemployerinc-gateway

Instead of navigating each one of them with cd and then manually run git pull branch, I came out with the following command that I run from greatemployerinc -the repos containing directory.

find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d -print -exec git -C {} pull \;

It will find any subdirectory in the current one (greatemployerinc), without going deeper than the first level (delimited by mindepth 1 and maxdepth 1) and execute a git pull in the corresponding git dir (if its a repo).

If you want to see more on the git -C option, you can check this post on SO

Keep in mind it will run a git pull on the current branch that each repository is actually stepping on. Also, consider the pull might fail if you have pending changes (it will be shown on the console output, anyway) and you might need to handle those cases manually, or considering adding an --autostash option to the provided command.

Wait, I can't memorize that command!

Then you and I have something in common :)

To avoid memorizing it, I created an alias. If you are working with ZSH you can just add this line to your ~/.zshrc file

alias multipull="find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d -print -exec git -C {} pull \;"

Then close your current terminal and open a new one (so the changes on .zshrc take effect), go to your equivalent greatemployerinc directory and do:

multipull

And drink your favorite infusion while your repos pull from remote :)

Conclusion

So, we created a quick small command to run a pull in multiple repos at once, then we created an alias for it so it is more easy to run later.

If you are willing to take it further, you can tweak it a little bit around if you want to customize the branch you pull from/into, run a different command, or try and make it run in parallel.

Updates

If you are interested on "resourcing" your terminal without closing/opening it, see this comment from JPBlancoDB

If you are interested on more complex scenarios, you can use a tool like myrepos just like Caleb Maclennan points out in this comment