In a script, I would like to determine if a tag or a branch was checked out.
For now, I have:
git describe --tags It will show the tag name, but if we are on a branch, it will raise an error (with return status != 0):
fatal: No names found, cannot describe anything. Can I rely on this behavior or is there a better/more official way to do so?
Are there some cases that are not caught by this method that I should know?
You can use git symbolic-ref HEAD to check if you are on a branch and get its name:
> git checkout master [....] > git symbolic-ref HEAD refs/heads/master > echo $? 0 If you have checked out a tag you will get an error:
> git checkout some_tag [....] > git symbolic-ref HEAD fatal: ref HEAD is not a symbolic ref > echo $? 128 (edit) better than what I had earlier:
if read what where huh; test "$what" = ref: then echo On branch ${where#refs/heads/} else echo "not on any branch; last checkout was:" git reflog|sed '/checkout:/!d;q' fi < "`git rev-parse --git-dir`"/HEAD will tell you where your last checkout came from.
git log HEAD^! --oneline --decorate will tell you all the symbolic names for your current commit.
git status (or git branch) to know on which branch you are. Note: you're always on a branch: the default branch is master.
Use git tag to know the list of tags on the current branch.
git branch will show that I'm on * (no-branch) so I guess I'm not always on a branch? Also git tag is not very helpful to know on which tag I am (i.e. which tag I checked out).
Well after some testing around, it turns out git describe --tags wasn't very reliable (in one case I had checked out a branch it did return something).
I ended up using:
git branch | grep '^*' This will return the selected branch. In case I checked out a tag, this will return:
* (no branch) In my script I parse the string to check if it contains (no branch).
git describe --tagsdoesn't throw any error. It just shows the first reachable tag from where you aregit describe --tagsis not good for this, see my own answer ^^