I wrote this script because I go through this same procedure all the time when using git, and it was bugging the hell out of me.
The point of this script is to refresh local branches from a remote repository in order to create a jumping-off point for new branches.
In particular this is useful for checking out a new branch off of a fresh
master. This helps to avoid rebase conflicts later down the road when code
needs to be merged back into master.
Here's the procedure used for refreshing the local branch:
- Check if the given remote name exists. If not, exit.
- Check if the given branch name exists in the local repo. If not, exit.
- Check if the given branch name exists in the remote repo. If not, exit.
- If you're starting on the branch that you want to refresh, create a temp branch with a unique UUID to use while manipulating your target branch.
- Delete the local instance of the given branch.
- Fetch the given branch from the given remote repo.
- Checkout the newly-fetched branch on the local machine.
- Delete the temp branch if you created one.
Copy the BASH script into /usr/local/bin or any other directories that are
included in the executable path on your machine.
Be sure to set the file as executable as well: sudo chmod +x git-refresh.
Usage is pretty simple. Here's the format:
git-refresh remote_name branch_name
So if I want to refresh my waffles-are-great branch on remote origin, then
I could just do this:
git-refresh origin waffles-are-great
The script will do the rest.
This script has only been tested in a BASH environment on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
desktop edition. It should be fairly portable to other BASH, zsh, and other
shell environments by changing the first line from #!/bin/bash to whatever
the path of your shell executable happens to be.
This script is owned by Michael Zazaian of Zopio LC and is published under version 3 of the GNU Affero General Public License.