githook - get branchname on a new repo

Question

I'm writing a prepare-commit-msg hook which appends the branch name to the commit msg. I m using this line to get the branch name

  local current_branch=$(git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD)

The problem is that if no prior commit exists (when the repo was just initizalised) the command fails with the following error message

git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD
HEAD
fatal: ambiguous argument 'HEAD': unknown revision or path not in the working tree.

Is there some better way to get at the branch name, or to suppress the warning / error?

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 07 '18 at 17:26

1

git symbolic-ref --short HEAD

answered Jun 07 '18 at 17:26

phd

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 08 '18 at 01:45

0

This is such a rare rare case, it's barely worth worrying about surely. You could just add a default, and suppress the error

$(git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD 2>/dev/null || echo "default branch")

answered Jun 08 '18 at 01:45

Mort

2 Answers2