Jump to github from your shell

29 Nov 2016

I’ve been going through the ‘Learning the bash Shell: Unix Shell Programming’ by Cameron Newham and ‘Classic Shell Scripting’ by Arnold Robbins over the last few months. I’ve learned a lot about the *nix way and I’m confident there is a tremendous amount more to learn.

The books encourage you to think about repetitive tasks you make on your day-to-day and try to automate them. I find myself constantly checking in new code locally with git and then going to github to either find the issue number I’m working on, or to reference a pull request by another team member. That means I’m sitting at my bash prompt, I leave to go to chrome, I go to chromes address bar and hope I remember the repository name. Wait, was this on github or bitbucket? Is the local directory the same as the repository name on github? That’s when I realized I should try to automate this.

This is not rocket science and I’m merely sharing because it’s saving me a lot of time, especially for it being so simple. Hopefully it helps others as well.

Here’s the bash script, go ahead and copy this into where you have user-wide scripts available. I like to put mine in ~/scripts, go ahead and name this remote.

#! /bin/bash

endpoint=$1

get_ext() {
  case $1 in
    *github*)
      case $endpoint in
        pr)
          echo "/pulls";;
        issues)
          echo "/issues";;
        *)
          echo ;;
      esac;;
    *bitbucket*)
      case $endpoint in
        pr)
          echo "/pull-requests";;
        issues)
          # issues aren't enabled by default for bb repos
          # so this might not always work
          echo "/issues";;
        *)
          echo ;;
      esac;;
  esac
}

open_site() {
  ext=$(get_ext $1)
  url=""
  if [[ $remote == *@* ]]; then
    # extract path from ssh
    name=$(echo "$remote" | sed  "s/^.*:\(.*\)\.git/\1/g")
    url="$1/${name}${ext}"
  else
    # extract uri from http
    name=$(echo "$remote" | sed "s/^.*: \(.*\).git/\1/g")
    url="${name}${ext}"
  fi
  open "$url"
}

# get remote from origin
remote=$(git remote show -n origin | grep Fetch.URL)

case $remote in
  *github*)
    open_site "https://github.com";;
  *bitbucket*)
    open_site "https://bitbucket.org";;
esac

You’ll want to alias that script in your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc like this:

alias github="~/scripts/remote"
alias bitbucket="~/scripts/remote"
alias remote="~/scripts/remote"

For whatever reason my brain thinks everything is on github so I generally just use the first alias from the command line. Go ahead and re-source your shell via . ~/bashrc (or zshrc depending on what you use).

Go to a directory with a git repository:

$ github
$ github pr
$ github issues

There you have it! Right now the script assumes the origin remote has the repo information (ie whether it lives on github or bitbucket). That is 99% true for my projects but it might not be for yours.

AR

Jump to github from your shell