Writing custom git command

This article introduces two extremely useful custom commands, git send and git done.

Writing custom git commands are simple as these three steps: - Create a file with a name in the given format git-mycommand. And this file should be given executable access. - The created file should be included in $PATH. This can be done in bashrc or in zshrc - Then you can run the command git mycommand in any of the git repo you have.

Let’s write a custom git command to add, commit, and then push the changes to remote with one command. Let’s call this command git send, which writes a useless commit message “wip”.

Step 1. Creating a file for our command

It’s good to have a directory to contain all our custom commands. So that it will be organized. Let’s create a directory.

mkdir .gitcustom

Create a file named git-send in the above created directory. And add the following code. Refer to the code in the gist here.

#!/bin/sh

currentBranch=$(git symbolic-ref --short -q HEAD) # Getting the current branch

git add .
git commit -m "wip"
git push origin $currentBranch

Last but not least, make that file as executable

chmod +x git-send

Step 2. Add custom commands to $PATH

This is quite important. This will help Git to recognize the custom commands.

We are adding the directory to $PATH. Add the following line to bashrc or to zshrc

export PATH=$PATH:<absolute_path>/.gitcustom

where absolute_path is the absolute path of the directory containing folder .gitcustom

You can now source the file or start a new instance of the terminal

source ~/.zshrc

Step 3. Running our custom command

With everything in place, it’s time to run our custom command. Go to any of your local git repo and run the following command

git send

The git-done command

After your work has been merged into the main branch, you can safely delete your working branch and rebase your local main branch. These steps can be accomplished by the custom git-done command:

#!/bin/sh

currentBranch=$(git symbolic-ref --short -q HEAD) # Getting the current branch

git checkout main
git fetch
git rebase origin/main
git branch -D $currentBranch

Both commands are provided in the .gitcustom folder in Canoe.