How can I get a list of Git branches, ordered by m

Question

I want to get a list of all the branches in a Git repository with the "freshest" branches at the top, where the "freshest" branch is the one that's been committed to most recently (and is, therefore, more likely to be one I want to pay attention to).

Is there a way I can use Git to either (a) sort the list of branches by latest commit, or (b) get a list of branches together with each one's last-commit date, in some kind of machine-readable format?

Worst case, I could always run git branch to get a list of all the branches, parse its output, and then git log -n 1 branchname --format=format:%ci for each one, to get each branch's commit date. But this will run on a Windows box, where spinning up a new process is relatively expensive, so launching the Git executable once per branch could get slow if there are a lot of branches. Is there a way to do all this with a single command?

Answer 1

I was able to reference the examples above to create something that works best for me.

git for-each-ref --sort=-committerdate refs/heads/ --format='%(authordate:short) %(color:red)%(objectname:short) %(color:yellow)%(refname:short)%(color:reset) (%(color:green)%(committerdate:relative)%(color:reset))'

Answer 2

I also needed colors, tags and remote references without any duplicates:

for ref in $(git for-each-ref --sort=-committerdate --format="%(refname)" refs/heads/ refs/remotes ); do git log -n1 $ref --pretty=format:"%Cgreen%cr%Creset %C(yellow)%d%Creset %C(bold blue)<%an>%Creset%n" | cat ; done | awk '! a[$0]++'

Because quoting can be hard, here the alias for bash:

alias glist='for ref in $(git for-each-ref --sort=-committerdate --format="%(refname)" refs/heads/ refs/remotes ); do git log -n1 $ref --pretty=format:"%Cgreen%cr%Creset %C(yellow)%d%Creset %C(bold blue)<%an>%Creset%n" | cat ; done | awk '"'! a["'$0'"]++'"

Answer 3

Here's the variation I was looking for:

git for-each-ref --sort=-committerdate --format='%(committerdate)%09%(refname:short)' refs/heads/ | tail -r

That tail -r reverses the list so the most-recent commiterdate is last.

Answer 4

Here's the optimal code, which combines the other two answers:

git for-each-ref --sort=-committerdate refs/heads/ --format='%(committerdate:short) %(authorname) %(refname:short)'

Answer 5

Based on ilius' version, but with the current branch shown with a star and in color, and only showing anything that is not described as "months" or "years" ago:

current_branch="$(git symbolic-ref --short -q HEAD)"
git for-each-ref --sort=committerdate refs/heads \
  --format='%(refname:short)|%(committerdate:relative)' \
  | grep -v '\(year\|month\)s\? ago' \
  | while IFS='|' read branch date
    do
      start='  '
      end=''
      if [[ $branch = $current_branch ]]; then
        start='* \e[32m'
        end='\e[0m'
      fi
      printf "$start%-30s %s$end\\n" "$branch" "$date"
    done

Answer 6

I came up with the following command (for Git 2.13 and later):

git branch -r --sort=creatordate \
    --format "%(creatordate:relative);%(committername);%(refname:lstrip=-1)" \
    | grep -v ";HEAD$" \
    | column -s ";" -t

If you don’t have column you can replace the last line with

    | sed -e "s/;/\t/g"

The output looks like

6 years ago             Tom Preston-Werner  book
4 years, 4 months ago   Parker Moore        0.12.1-release
4 years ago             Matt Rogers         1.0-branch
3 years, 11 months ago  Matt Rogers         1.2_branch
3 years, 1 month ago    Parker Moore        v1-stable
12 months ago           Ben Balter          pages-as-documents
10 months ago           Jordon Bedwell      make-jekyll-parallel
6 months ago            Pat Hawks           to_integer
5 months ago            Parker Moore        3.4-stable-backport-5920
4 months ago            Parker Moore        yajl-ruby-2-4-patch
4 weeks ago             Parker Moore        3.4-stable
3 weeks ago             Parker Moore        rouge-1-and-2
19 hours ago            jekyllbot           master

I wrote a blog post about how the various pieces work.