How do I get the name of the current branch in Git?

General Discussions
#1

How do I get the name of the current branch in Git?

#2

Hey Jasmin,

I often fall into the same thing , something it can be challenging, but here’s what I follow to view all local branches in your repository, including the current branch indicated by a star (*), you can use:

git branch

To only retrieve the name of the current branch, you can use:

git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD

Starting from Git version 2.22, you can use the --show-current option to directly print the name of the current branch:

git branch --show-current

This combination also works for newly initialized repositories before the first commit.

Hope this helped you :slight_smile:

#3

Hey Jasmine,

Using git symbolic-ref --short HEAD:

git symbolic-ref --short HEAD

This command retrieves the symbolic reference for the HEAD pointer, which points to the current branch.

The --short option gets a shorter, more human-readable branch name. This method is efficient and recommended for scripts that must programmatically determine the current branch.

Hope this helps

#4

Hey Jasmine,

Using git status and grep: Using git status and grep (not recommended for scripting, but can be useful for quick checks):

git status | grep "On branch" | cut -d " " -f 3-

This method relies on the output of git status, which includes the current branch information under “On branch [branch-name]”.

  • grep “On branch” is used to filter the line containing the branch name.
  • cut -d " " -f 3- is used to extract the branch name part from the output.
  • While this method works, it’s not as reliable as the git symbolic-ref method, especially for scripting, as it relies on the specific format of the git status output.