Summarize git repo info into shell variables

This is designed to replace multiple calls to git with a single use of eval $(git-status-vars). It’s especially useful for generating a shell prompt.

This is intended to be generally usable in any theme that wants to report git information in any shell with sh-like strings. I use it in my personal ZSH theme.

Installation

You can download binaries from the GitHub releases page. Just extract them and copy the file inside into your $PATH, e.g. /usr/local/bin. The most common ones are:

• Linux: x86-64, ARM
• macOS: Intel, Apple silicon
• Windows on x86-64

If you have cargo, you can just do cargo install git-status-vars to install from source, or if you’ve installed cargo binstall you can use that (cargo binstall git-status-vars).

Usage

sh eval $(git-status-vars 2>/dev/null) if [[ $repo_state == "NotFound" ]] ; then return 0 fi

This outputs a bunch of sh compatible environment variables about the current repository. The repository is found by looking at each of the following in order and taking the first that matches:

1. Command line parameter. A repository directory, or a subdirectory of a repository, may be passed on the command line.
2. The $GIT_DIR environment variable, just like git.
3. A .git directory in the working directory or one of its parents.

git-status-vars will always output repo_state=, but all other variables may be left out. In particular, if it can’t find a repository, it will output only repo_state=NotFound.

Example prompt function with git-status-vars

```sh gitprompt () { eval $(git-status-vars 2>/dev/null) if [[ $repostate == "NotFound" ]] ; then return 0 fi

local fgcolor=green if (( $untrackedcount > 0 )) ; then fg_color=red fi

local ref=$headref1short if [[ -z $ref ]] ; then ref=${head_hash:0:8} fi

print -Pn "%F{$fg_color}${ref}%f " } ```

Equivalent prompt function without git-status-vars

```sh gitprompt () { setopt localoptions pipefail local untrackedcount fgcolor=green untracked_count=$(git ls-files --other --exclude-standard 2>/dev/null | wc -l) if (( $? != 0 )) ; then # No repository return 0 fi

local fgcolor=green if (( $untrackedcount > 0 )) ; then fg_color=red fi

# Try for the branch or tag name, then try for the commit hash ref=$(git symbolic-ref --short HEAD 2>/dev/null) \ || ref="$(git show-ref --head --hash --abbrev HEAD 2>/dev/null | head -n1)"

print -Pn "%F{$fg_color}${ref}%f " } ```

Typical output

~/projects/git-status-vars ❯ git-status-vars repo_state=Clean repo_workdir=/Users/daniel/projects/git-status-vars/ repo_empty=false repo_bare=false head_ref_length=1 head_ref1_name=refs/heads/main head_ref1_short=main head_ref1_kind=direct head_ref1_error='' head_hash=2df6b768e60fbf899d8c8dc4a20385f30ee5da24 head_ahead=0 head_behind=0 head_upstream_error='' untracked_count=0 unstaged_count=0 staged_count=0 conflicted_count=0 ~/projects/git-status-vars ❯ cd / / ❯ git-status-vars repo_state=NotFound

Performance

git-status-vars is generally faster than multiple calls to git, though git is fast enough that the difference will not usually be perceptible. On my laptop git-status-vars typically runs in around 8 ms whereas the fallback code involving multiple calls to git takes around 25 ms.

I have not tested this on large repositories.

Rust Crate

I’m not sure how useful it is, but this may be used from other Rust code.

Development and contributions

See DEVELOPMENT.md for notes on contributing to this repo, the license, how changes are tracked, and how releases are made.