How to find the current git branch in detached HEAD state

Question

I can find the current git branch name by doing either of these:

git branch | awk \'/^\\*/ { print $2 }\'
git describe --contains --all HEAD

<

Answer 1

I needed a bit different solution for Jenkins because it does not have local copies of the branches. So the current commit must be matched against the remote branches:

git ls-remote --heads origin | grep $(git rev-parse HEAD) | cut -d / -f 3

or without network:

git branch --remote --verbose --no-abbrev --contains | sed -rne 's/^[^\/]*\/([^\ ]+).*$/\1/p'

It's also worth noting that this might return multiple branch names when you have multiple branch heads at the same commit.

UPDATE:

I just noticed that Jenkins sets GIT_BRANCH environment variable which contains a value like origin/master. This can be used to get git branch in Jenksin too:

echo $GIT_BRANCH | cut -d / -f 2