Display current Git branch in bash prompt

While working on a project I maintain multiple branches for development. I keep at least two branches, master (the default one) and develop. I work on develop branch and when I complete certain task I merge the work with master branch and push code to the repository. That’s how I work :)

At times I forget on which branch I am working, I have to run git branch to know the current branch. I am a bit lazy and I find running the same command again and again annoying. So I thought why not display the current branch in the command prompt. I did google search and found several results. This post is the result of those multiple search results.

Edit .bashrc file. Run the following command to edit .bashrc file: vim ~/.bashrc. You can replace vim with your favourite editor.

At the end of file add the following piece of code:

# Append current git branch in prompt
parse_git_branch() {
  if ! git rev-parse --git-dir > /dev/null 2>&1; then
    return 0
  fi
  git_branch=$(git branch 2>/dev/null| sed -n '/^\*/s/^\* //p')
  echo "[$git_branch]"

}

PS1="${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\[\033[01;36m\]\u@\h\[\033[00m\]:\[\033[01;32m\]\w\[\033[00m\]\[\033[01;31m\]\$(parse_git_branch)\[\033[00m\]$ "

Cool.. eh? :)

PS1 is used to change the bash command prompt.

Inside the PS1 variable you can see I have given certain codes like 01;32, 01;31, etc. These are color codes for bash prompt. A list of colors are available here.

References:

• How to Change the Command-Line Prompt Colour in the Ubuntu/Linux Terminal
• Prepend current git branch in terminal
• Add current Git branch to your Bash prompt