Speeding up your gitflow with aliases

Sometimes it gets boring to have to write those long git commands over and over again, and one of the attributes that makes a great programmer is laziness.

In an effort to improve my laziness, I put together these aliases on the git commands I use most to speed up my gitflow. If you're on a mac or a linux machine, you can set them up in your .bashrc or .bash_profile. These files can be found in your home directory (basically the default path that your terminal will be on when you open it. The dot means that they're hidden files so... keep that in mind in case you're wondering why you're not seeing them. Running ls -a on the terminal should show you all the files in the directory, then you can edit for example the .bashrc by running vim .bashrc or nano .bashrc or gedit .bashrc etc). A basic familiarity with the terminal is assumed so I won't go much into it 😊. Feel free to reach out to me though if you're having problems.

Initialising a new git repository

alias gi='git init'

So that instead of doing git init you just do gi

Checking the status of files

alias gs='git status'

So that instead of doing git status you just do gs

Adding files to the staging area

alias ga='git add'

So that instead of doing git add file you just do ga file

Committing your changes

alias gcm='git commit -m'

So that instead of doing git commit -m "commit message" you just do gcm "commit message"

Pushing your changes to a remote origin

alias gpso='git push origin'

So that instead of doing git push origin develop you just do gpso develop

Pulling changes from a remote origin

alias gplo='git pull origin'

So that instead of doing git pull origin develop you just do gplo develop

Checking your branches

alias gb='git branch'

So that instead of doing git branch you just do gb

Switching branches

alias gc='git checkout'

So that instead of doing git checkout master you just do gc master

Creating a new branch and switching to it

alias gcb='git checkout -b'

So that instead of doing git checkout -b ft-branch you just do gcb ft-branch

Renaming a branch

#if you are on the branch you want to rename
alias gbm='git branch -m'

So that instead of doing git branch -m bg-branch you just do gbm bg-branch

Merging a branch

alias gm='git merge'

So that instead of doing git merge bg-branch you just do gm bg-branch

Deleting a branch

alias gbd='git branch -d' #use -D for a forced delete

So that instead of doing git branch -d ft-branch you just do gbd ft-branch

These are just a few of the ones I most commonly use. There's a whole lot of other commands that you may use from time to time, and you can always come back to your aliases and add them.

If you add all the above aliases to your .bashrc or .bash_profile (or .zshrc if you're using Zsh), this is how it should look:

# .bashrc or .bash_profile or .zshrc
# git aliases
alias gi='git init'
alias gs='git status'
alias ga='git add'
alias gcm='git commit -m'
alias gpso='git push origin'
alias gplo='git pull origin'
alias gb='git branch'
alias gc='git checkout'
alias gcb='git checkout -b'
alias gbm='git branch -m'
alias gm='git merge'
alias gbd='git branch -d' #use -D for a forced delete

Remember to run source .bashrc, source .bash_profile or source .zshrc when you're done adding your aliases. If no errors are displayed, you're good to go.