via Bedazzle Your Bash Prompt with Git Info // RailsTips by John Nunemaker.

I came across the above rails tip by John Nunemaker today. It shows how you can show which git branch you’re on while in your bash terminal.

The code he provided didn’t exactly work for me (I’m on OSX) so I ended up changing things a little bit:

function parse_git_branch {
  git branch 2> /dev/null | sed -e '/^[^*]/d' -e 's/* \(.*\)/(\1)/'
}

GREEN="\[33[0;32m\]"
YELLOW="\[33[0;33m\]"
WHITE="\[33[0;0m\]"

PS1="$GREEN\$(date +%H:%M) \w$YELLOW \$(parse_git_branch)$WHITE\$ "

This produces a bash that looks like the screenshot below. As you’ve probably guessed, jetpack is the git repo/directory and authorization is the branch I’m currently on.

ReinH | A Git Workflow for Agile Teams

Sharing of good work-flow is one of the keys to adoption and effective use of new technology.

Git is a relatively new technology and it’s workflow is not a topic that is discussed often in the Rails community SO it intrigued me when Bryan Liles mentioned the above article by ReinH in one of his videos. I highly recommend giving it a read as it presents some interesting ideas.

Here’s an example. Recently I had a need to build an ecommerce site. Spree is a nice open source ecommerce system built on Rails… however, it does not suit my needs perfectly and when I started looking around the code, I found some code that could be refactored to act more effectively.

I like to commit often… sometimes a little too often. Sometimes I’ll make a change, commit it, do a browser check to see if it works, go back, fix any errors, commit again, and repeat the cycle. The result of my frequent committing is that I have a ton of tiny commits that others won’t really find useful following along. If they tried, they’d understand, but they’d waste a ton of time because the commits are small and often filled with errors that are fixed on the next 2 or 3 commits.

What should I do? The article by ReinH proposes an answer to the problem. Go check it out! Be sure to not be a passive blog reader. Please leave feedback on what you thought. It acts as fuel for bloggers.

Conversation from IRC #git channel

melvinram: I am working on a new machine and I’ve got a git repo inside github. I’ve just pulled it down and it’s currently on the master branch. How do I get it to pull down branch xyz and have it checkout? Is it: git checkout -b xyz origin/xyz

jnareb: melvinram: fetch, then either create tracking local branch reflecting remote-tracking branch, or directly checkout which would detach HEAD

jnareb: melvinram: that is one solution, and I guess the one you would want; unless you want to only “take a look”

jnareb: “git checkout -b branch remote/branch” (which creates local tracking branch), or “git checkout remote/branch” (which detaches HEAD -> you are on ‘no branch’)