git: programmatically know by how much the branch is ahead/behind a remote branch

Question

I would like to extract the information that is printed after a git status, which looks like:

# On branch master
# Your branch is ahead of \'origin/         


        

Answer 1

With recent versions of git you should use

git status --porcelain --branch

and check for ahead/behind:

## master...origin/master [behind 1]

--porcelain[=version]

Give the output in an easy-to-parse format for scripts. This is similar to the short output, but will remain stable across Git versions and regardless of user configuration. See below for details.

-b, --branch

Show the branch and tracking info even in short-format.