Make Yourself Some Git Plugins

You may already be aware of some popular git plugins:

• git-recursive-blame
• git-fire
• git-blame-someone-else
• git-secret
• git-standup
• git-recent
• git-fresh
• git-autosave (wait, who made that?)

Many of you likely already know how to implement such a plugin, but I want to provide a short tutorial for everyone else.

A command that I often find useful is git publish. If the branch doesn't already exist on the remote, it's nice to be able to have an alias for git push --set-upstream origin $BRANCH_NAME. Some plugins do this automatically, but it's very easy to write, so there's not much reason we can't implement it ourselves.

#!/usr/bin/env sh

BRANCH=${git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD}
git push --set-upstream origin $BRANCH

Now that we have that, we can make it accessible to Git. The easiest way to do this is to put the script in your ~/.local/bin directory, since it's usually already in the PATH. We'll call the full file: ~/.local/bin/git-publish. We won't add a .sh file extension, because the shebang already tells the OS how to run this program.

Then we just need to make the program executable. Run chmod +x ~/.local/bin/git-publish, and you're done. We can now run it as git publish. When Git sees the publish command, it will look through the path to see if an executable called git-publish exists, and run that.

See how easy that was? If you want to do something more complicated with Git, I recommend reading the Git Internals chapter from Pro Git. Git is really more of a database than a version control system, and I'm always disappointed by the lack of creativity people put into git plugins. Writing a sillier project would be too long for this blog post, but it'd be cool to see someone make an MMO using Git as the database. The sky is the limit.