An interesting problem came up a work where I am maintaining a couple of legacy enterprise applications written in PHP. These applications were first developed over a decade ago and the version control was originally managed in SVN. Later they were moved to Git. I do not know the full reason why, though I have a theory, but both applications break down into multiple components, each of which is managed in a separate Git repository. This isn’t a huge issue, but it does create headaches when working on multiple tickets that impact multiple components. I want to make my changes for each ticket on a new Git branch for that ticket while leaving unmodified components on their master branch in Git. Unfortunately, there isn’t an easy solution to figure out what branch each Git repository is pointed at, a problem when there are perhaps ten separate repositories that all interact with each other.
Anyhow, yesterday I wrote a Bash script to address the issue, so I can now get a quick summary of what branch each repository is currently pointed at. Since writing the Bash script took a bit of research, trial and error (as Bash does), and was generally a bit of a pain in the ass (as Bash scripting is), I figured I’d publish my Bash script so that someone else out there might benefit from what otherwise would be a single use tool written for myself, and possibly a few interested team members working with these clusters of Git repos.
#!/bin/bash
app_path="${HOME}/path/to/application"
# Get all the repo paths for opsdb and store them in an array.
repo_paths=()
while IFS= read -r -d $'\0'; do
repo_paths+=("$REPLY")
done < <(find ${app_path} -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -type d -print0)
#echo ${#repo_paths[@]} # DEBUG Print the legth of the arrray.
# For each array, write the path and output the current branch.
for component_path in ${repo_paths[@]}; do
echo -n "${component_path}: "
git --git-dir=${component_path}/.git --work-tree=${component_path} rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD
done
