Vincent Cardillo

A software engineer in San Francisco.

Putting the Git Branch Name on the Command Prompt

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Sometimes it’s handy to always see which branch of the repository we’re working in. We can display this as part of the terminal command prompt by adding a few things to our local .bashrc file.

~/.bashrc
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function parse_git_branch {
  git branch 2> /dev/null | sed -e '/^[^*]/d' -e 's/* \(.*\)/ (\1)/'
}

# This will display the current folder's full path.
# If you want only the folder name, replace \w with \W
export PS1="\[\e]0;\u@\h: \w\a\]${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h:\w\[\033[36m\]\$(parse_git_branch)\[\033[0m\]\$ "

And now our command prompt looks like this:

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you@host:~/Project/folder (master)$

The branch name will always be displayed in parenthesis for us.