How to get the current checked out Git branch name through pygit2?

Question

This question should be related to:

• How to get the current branch name in Git?
• Get git current branch/tag name
• How to get the name of the current git branch into a variable in a shell script?
• How to programmatically determine the current checked out Git branch

But I am wondering how to do that through pygit2?

Answer 1

To get the conventional "shorthand" name:

from pygit2 import Repository

Repository('.').head.shorthand  # 'master'

Answer 2

From PyGit Documentation

Either of these should work

#!/usr/bin/python
from pygit2 import Repository

repo = Repository('/path/to/your/git/repo')

# option 1
head = repo.head
print("Head is " + head.name)

# option 2
head = repo.lookup_reference('HEAD').resolve()
print("Head is " + head.name)

You'll get the full name including /refs/heads/. If you don't want that strip it out or use shorthand instead of name.

./pygit_test.py  
Head is refs/heads/master 
Head is refs/heads/master

Answer 3

In case you don't want to or can't use pygit2

May need to alter path - this assumes you are in the parent directory of .git

from pathlib import Path

def get_active_branch_name():

    head_dir = Path(".") / ".git" / "HEAD"
    with head_dir.open("r") as f: content = f.read().splitlines()

    for line in content:
        if line[0:4] == "ref:":
            return line.partition("refs/heads/")[2]

Answer 4

You can use GitPython:

from git import Repo
local_repo = Repo(path=settings.BASE_DIR)
local_branch = local_repo.active_branch.name