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Waylon Walker
Waylon Walker

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Two new shell aliases for git

Recently I added two new bash/zsh aliases to make my git experience just a tad better.

trackme

Most of our work repos were recently migrated to new remote urls, we scriped out the update to all of the repos, but I was left with a tracking error for all of my open branches. To easily resolve this I just made an alias so that I can just run trackme anytime I see this error.

There is no tracking information for the current branch.
    Please specify which branch you want to merge with.
    See git-pull(1) for details

    git pull <remote> <branch>

If you wish to set tracking information for this branch you can do so with:

    git branch --set-upstream develop origin/<branch>
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getting the branch

The following command will always return the currently checked out branch name.

git symbolic-ref --short HEAD
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Injecting this into the suggested git command as a subshell gives us this alias that when ran with trackme will automatically fix tracking for my branch.

alias trackme='git branch --set-upstream-to=origin/$(git symbolic-ref --short HEAD)'
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rebasemain

I sometimes get a bit lazy at checking main for changes before submitting any prs, so again I made a quick shell alias that will rebase main into my branch before I open a pr.

alias rebasemain='git pull origin main --rebase'
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The Aliases

Here are both of the alias's, feel free to steal and modify them into your dotfiles. If you are uniniatiated a common starting place to put these is either in your ~/.bashrch or ~/.zshrc depending on your shell of choice.

alias trackme='git branch --set-upstream-to=origin/$(git symbolic-ref --short HEAD)'
alias rebasemain='git pull origin main --rebase'
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