Git Aliases

When you work with git every day sometimes typing all these commands can be tedious, git aliases are here to make you more efficient. It is very simple to configure them and to use them, here is how you can configure your git aliases.

git config --global alias.<alias-name> <git-command>

git aliases that are really useful:

git config --global alias.st status

git config --global alias.sts 'status --short --branch'

git config --global alias.unstage 'reset HEAD --'

git config --global alias.undo 'reset HEAD~1 --mixed'

git config --global alias.co checkout

git config --global alias.cob 'checkout -b'

git config --global alias.br branch

To print last 10 commits from your project history without opening git pager, you can also pass number of commit you want to be printed. e.g. $ git npl 5.

git configl --global alias.npl '!f() { DEFAULT_N=${1-10}; git --no-pager log --oneline --decorate --graph -${1-$DEFAULT_N}; }; f'

To delete alias use this command:

git config --global --unset alias.<alias-name>

One more useful thing to know if you want to add git alias that chains multiple git commands using bash operators. For example, we want to add an alias for adding all files that have been changed and files that are untracked by git as well, to the Staging Area and to commit them with inline commit message.

git config --global alias.aaac 'git add -A && git commit -m'

If you add an alias like this it will fail when you try to execute it, you will get an error similar to one shown bellow.

expansion of alias 'aaac' failed; 'git' is not a git command

So to make it work we have to add ! exclamation mark, it will allow us to use any command and not just git commands, so right way to define alias would be:

git config --global alias.aaac '!git add -A && git commit -m'