Checkout or list remote branches in GitPython

Question

I don't see an option to checkout or list remote/local branches in this module: https://gitpython.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

Answer 1

After you’ve done

from git import Git
g = Git()

(and possibly some other command to init g to the repository you care about) all attribute requests on g are more or less transformed into a call of git attr *args.

Therefore:

g.checkout("mybranch")

should do what you want.

g.branch()

will list the branches. However, note that these are very low level commands and they will return the exact code that the git executables will return. Therefore, don’t expect a nice list. I’ll just be a string of several lines and with one line having an asterisk as the first character.

There might be some better way to do this in the library. In repo.py for example is a special active_branch command. You’ll have to go through the source a little and look for yourself.

Answer 2

To list branches currently you can use:

from git import Repo
r = Repo(your_repo_path)
repo_heads = r.heads # or it's alias: r.branches

r.heads returns git.util.IterableList (inherits after list) of git.Head objects, so you can:

repo_heads_names = [h.name for h in repo_heads]

And to checkout eg. master:

repo_heads['master'].checkout() 
# you can get elements of IterableList through it_list['branch_name'] 
# or it_list.branch_name

Module mentioned in the question is GitPython which moved from gitorious to Github.

Answer 3

I had a similar issue. In my case I only wanted to list the remote branches that are tracked locally. This worked for me:

import git

repo = git.Repo(repo_path)
branches = []
for r in repo.branches:
    branches.append(r)
    # check if a tracking branch exists
    tb = t.tracking_branch()
    if tb:
        branches.append(tb) 

In case all remote branches are needed, I would prefer running git directly:

def get_all_branches(path):
    cmd = ['git', '-C', path, 'branch', '-a']
    out = subprocess.check_output(cmd, stderr=subprocess.STDOUT)
    return out

Answer 4

Just to make it obvious - to get a list of remote branches from the current repo directory:

import os, git

# Create repo for current directory
repo = git.Repo(os.getcwd())

# Run "git branch -r" and collect results into array
remote_branches = []
for ref in repo.git.branch('-r').split('\n'):
    print ref
    remote_branches.append(ref)