How to check if remote branch exists on a given remote repository?

git

I need to do a subtree merge for a specific branch, if it exists on a given remote repository. The problem is that the remote repository is not checked out locally, so I can't use git branch -r. All I have is a remote address, something like this https://github.com/project-name/project-name.git. Is there a way to list remote branches just by a remote address? I couldn't find anything usefull :(

Solution 1:

$ git ls-remote --heads [email protected]:user/repo.git branch-name

In case branch-name is found you will get the following output:

b523c9000c4df1afbd8371324083fef218669108        refs/heads/branch-name

Otherwise no output will be sent.

So piping it to wc will give you 1 or 0:

$ git ls-remote --heads [email protected]:user/repo.git branch-name | wc -l

Alternatively you can set --exit-code flag on git ls-remote which will return exit code 2 in case no matching refs are found. The result can be checked directly in a shell test or by checking the status variable $?.

$ git ls-remote --exit-code --heads [email protected]:user/repo.git branch-name

Solution 2:

git ls-remote --heads https://github.com/rails/rails.git
5b3f7563ae1b4a7160fda7fe34240d40c5777dcd    refs/heads/1-2-stable
81d828a14c82b882e31612431a56f830bdc1076f    refs/heads/2-0-stable
b5d759fd2848146f7ee7a4c1b1a4be39e2f1a2bc    refs/heads/2-1-stable
c6cb5a5ab00ac9e857e5b2757d2bce6a5ad14b32    refs/heads/2-2-stable
e0774e47302a907319ed974ccf59b8b54d32bbde    refs/heads/2-3-stable
13ad87971cc16ebc5c286b484821e2cb0fc3e3b1    refs/heads/3-0-stable
3df6c73f9edb3a99f0d51d827ef13a439f31743a    refs/heads/3-1-stable
f4db3d72ea564c77d5a689b850751ce510500585    refs/heads/compressor
c5a809e29e9213102351def7e791c3a8a67d7371    refs/heads/deps_refactor
821e15e5f2d9ef2aa43918a16cbd00f40c221e95    refs/heads/encoding
8f57bf207ff4f28fa8da4544ebc573007b65439d    refs/heads/master
c796d695909c8632b4074b7af69a1ef46c68289a    refs/heads/sass-cleanup
afd7140b66e7cb32e1be58d9e44489e6bcbde0dc    refs/heads/serializers

Solution 3:

You can also use this:

git show-branch remotes/origin/<<remote-branch-name>>

returns latest commit and value of $? is 0 otherwise returns "fatal: bad sha1 reference remotes/origin/<>" and value of $? is 128

Solution 4:

All of the answers here are Linux shell-specific, which doesn't help very much if you're in an environment that doesn't support those sort of operations - for example, Windows' command prompt.

Fortunately git ls-remote accepts an --exit-code argument that returns 0 or 2 depending on whether the branch exists or not, respectively. So:

git ls-remote --exit-code --heads origin <branch-that-exists-in-origin>

will return 0, and

git ls-remote --exit-code --heads origin <branch-that-only-exists-locally>

will return 2.

For PowerShell, you can simply use the built-in truthiness handling semantics:

if (git ls-remote --heads origin <branch-that-exists-in-origin>) { $true } else { $false }

yields $true, while:

if (git ls-remote --heads origin <branch-that-only-exists-locally>) { $true } else { $false }

yields $false.

Solution 5:

Another way you can use in the current folder if it is a git repo to run

git branch -a | egrep 'remotes/origin/${YOUR_BRANCH_NAME}$'