DZone
Thanks for visiting DZone today,
Edit Profile
  • Manage Email Subscriptions
  • How to Post to DZone
  • Article Submission Guidelines
Sign Out View Profile
  • Post an Article
  • Manage My Drafts
Over 2 million developers have joined DZone.
Log In / Join
Refcards Trend Reports
Events Video Library
Refcards
Trend Reports

Events

View Events Video Library

Zones

Culture and Methodologies Agile Career Development Methodologies Team Management
Data Engineering AI/ML Big Data Data Databases IoT
Software Design and Architecture Cloud Architecture Containers Integration Microservices Performance Security
Coding Frameworks Java JavaScript Languages Tools
Testing, Deployment, and Maintenance Deployment DevOps and CI/CD Maintenance Monitoring and Observability Testing, Tools, and Frameworks
Culture and Methodologies
Agile Career Development Methodologies Team Management
Data Engineering
AI/ML Big Data Data Databases IoT
Software Design and Architecture
Cloud Architecture Containers Integration Microservices Performance Security
Coding
Frameworks Java JavaScript Languages Tools
Testing, Deployment, and Maintenance
Deployment DevOps and CI/CD Maintenance Monitoring and Observability Testing, Tools, and Frameworks

Enterprise AI Trend Report: Gain insights on ethical AI, MLOps, generative AI, large language models, and much more.

2024 Cloud survey: Share your insights on microservices, containers, K8s, CI/CD, and DevOps (+ enter a $750 raffle!) for our Trend Reports.

PostgreSQL: Learn about the open-source RDBMS' advanced capabilities, core components, common commands and functions, and general DBA tasks.

AI Automation Essentials. Check out the latest Refcard on all things AI automation, including model training, data security, and more.

Related

  • Elevate Your Terminal Game: Hacks for a Productive Workspace
  • Streamlining AWS Lambda Deployments
  • Source Code Management and Branching Strategies for CI/CD
  • A Comprehensive Guide to GitHub

Trending

  • AI-Driven API and Microservice Architecture Design for Cloud
  • The Future of Agile Roles: The Future of Agility
  • Why You Should Move From Monolith to Microservices
  • Integrating Salesforce APEX REST
  1. DZone
  2. Testing, Deployment, and Maintenance
  3. Deployment
  4. Git Alias: Make Your Git Experience Simpler, Easier, Faster and Clean

Git Alias: Make Your Git Experience Simpler, Easier, Faster and Clean

Make things simpler and easier with these customizable Git shortcuts.

By 
Monzurul Haque Shimul user avatar
Monzurul Haque Shimul
·
Updated Dec. 21, 18 · Tutorial
Like (6)
Save
Tweet
Share
13.0K Views

Join the DZone community and get the full member experience.

Join For Free

An alias, or a shortcut, allows us to replace a long or less memorable command with a simple one. In this post, I will talk about Git aliases.

If you use Git on the terminal or command-line, And you don't want to type the entire text of each of the Git commands, you can set up an alias for each command using git config. For example, you may want to set up:

$ git config --global alias.st status


Now instead of typing git status, you just need to type git st to check the status of your Git repository. Here are a couple of more examples you may want to set up:

$ git config --global alias.a add
$ git config --global alias.b branch
$ git config --global alias.c commit
$ git config --global alias.co checkout
$ git config --global alias.cob checkout -b


Another way of adding git aliases is to add it in ~/.gitconfig file. Just open the file with your favorite text editor and add aliases like:

[alias]
    st = status
    a = add
    b = branch
    c = commit
    co = checkout
    cob = checkout -b


Creating a Git alias can also be very useful in creating commands that are missing in Git and that you think should exist. For example, while unstaging a file, you can add your own unstage alias to Git:

$ git config --global alias.unstage 'reset HEAD --'


This makes the following two commands equivalent:

$ git unstage fileA
$ git reset HEAD -- fileA


Obviously, it looks more clean and clearer to use the  git unstage  command than the  git reset HEAD --.

Git alias is not limited for the Git provided commands only. You can also run any external command by adding  !  character at the beginning of it. This is useful when you write your own commands that work with a Git repository. For example, we can make an alias git ui to run gitk or sourcetree :

$ git config --global alias.ui '!gitk'
$ git config --global alias.ui '!sourcetree'

Very much simple! Isn't it?

So far, I have talked about global Git aliases. But you can add repo specific Git aliases too. They are useful to override the global aliases. To add repo specific alias, edit the .git/config file in the repo where you want to add the alias, and follow the same syntax. You can also add them using git config without the --global flag.

That's it for now. Add aliases to your Git repositories as you need them to make your Git experience simpler, easier, faster and clean. I hope you'll find it very useful in your daily Git usages.

Attribution:

Pro Git Book - https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Basics-Git-Aliases

Git

Published at DZone with permission of Monzurul Haque Shimul. See the original article here.

Opinions expressed by DZone contributors are their own.

Related

  • Elevate Your Terminal Game: Hacks for a Productive Workspace
  • Streamlining AWS Lambda Deployments
  • Source Code Management and Branching Strategies for CI/CD
  • A Comprehensive Guide to GitHub

Partner Resources


Comments

ABOUT US

  • About DZone
  • Send feedback
  • Community research
  • Sitemap

ADVERTISE

  • Advertise with DZone

CONTRIBUTE ON DZONE

  • Article Submission Guidelines
  • Become a Contributor
  • Core Program
  • Visit the Writers' Zone

LEGAL

  • Terms of Service
  • Privacy Policy

CONTACT US

  • 3343 Perimeter Hill Drive
  • Suite 100
  • Nashville, TN 37211
  • support@dzone.com

Let's be friends: