In a previous post on git (Using GIT from the CLI), I listed a fair few commands which are very useful. For the most part they’re fairly simple commands/options, but occasionally they become less easy to remember.

For example to check for merge conflicts on a branch that you may wish to merge master to, you can type

git merge master --no-ff --no-commit

Luckily I have this blog post allowing me to copy and paste this command, an alternate might be to create an alias to this command.

Adding an alias

Creating the alias is simply a way to store a command name within git’s global config which runs another command. Whether we want to simply shorten a name, like using co and ci in place of checkout and commit or shorten a command such as the merge above with check-conflicts.

To create an alias we use the following

git config --global alias.check-conflicts 'merge master --no-ff --no-commit'

In this example we’re telling git to add configuration using –global option (so the configuration is across all repositories or –local for just this repository). We create the alias using the alias option followed by a period/full stop and then the name we want for our alias. This is then followed by the git command and options (within single or double quotes if there are multiple options).

Now we can execute

git check-conflicts

Deleting an Alias

To delete an alias we can either remove it from the config file (for example .gitconfig) or run the following command line

git config --global --unset alias.check-conflicts

Listing Aliases

We can look in the .gitconfig or run the following command line to list the available aliases

git config --get-regexp '^alias\.'

Creating an Alias to list Aliases

To round this up nicely, let’s now create an alias to list aliases, for example

git config --global alias.alias "config --get-regexp ^alias\."