Git get worktree for every branch in seperate folders - Bash

Question

Git get worktree for every branch in seperate folders - Bash

1.5k Views Asked by Theo At 30 April 2025 at 05:44

I need to write a bash script that copies our repository branches onto our local linux web server every hour.

We have a git remote repository (gitolite) with branches named "master" "testing" "feature-featurename" "hotfix-number" each one of these branches is supposed to have its worktree copied to /var/www/html/branchname

First of all: How do I get different worktrees copied into different folders? Second: How can I automate this process if the "feature-" and "hotfix-" branches constantly change names?

This has nothing to do with a git hook, this is supposed to be a script running on a different server which is triggered by a cron job.

Original Q&A

There are 3 best solutions below

Mark Adelsberger On 07 September 2017 at 18:11

So first you need a list of branches. For scripting purposes, the command best used for this is for-each-ref. Assuming you just want the local branch names, use something like

git for-each-ref refs/heads/* |cut -d\/ -f3

As an aside, a couple things in the above command assume that you don't use branches in "namespaces". If you use branch names like qa/feature-1 - containing / - then that changes a few things. The above command simply becomes

git for-each-ref refs/heads |cut -d\/ -f3-

but the bigger issue is you probably have to think more about how branch names should map to directory names. So for now I'll proceed with the assumption that branch names won't contain /.

You need to process each branch, so

git for-each-ref refs/heads/* |cut -d\/ -f3 |while read branch; do
  # ... will process each branch here
done

Now you can use git worktree to streamline the individual checkouts. (Note that this should be much more efficient that using archive to copy the whole commit content for every branch, then invoking tar to undo the work you didn't want archive to do in the first place.)

To make sure all required work trees are defined

git for-each-ref refs/heads/* |cut -d\/ -f3 |while read branch; do
  if [ ! -d .git/worktrees/$branch ]; then
    git worktree add /var/www/html/$branch $branch
  fi
done

Now one thing about this is that when the branches are moved (i.e. when pushes are received), it puts the work trees "out of sync" so that you appear to have staged the "undoing" of every change the push did. (The protections for the default work tree don't seem to apply.)

But that seems in line with your requirements; the alternative would be to have the directories updated as pushes come in, which you reject in your description of the problem. So your script should, in that case, sync the worktree to the new changes by "un-undoing" them

git for-each-ref refs/heads/* |cut -d\/ -f3 |while read branch; do
  if [ ! -d .git/worktrees/$branch ]; then
    git worktree add /var/www/html/$branch $branch
  fi
  git reset --hard HEAD
done

Of course sometimes branches go away; if you don't want stale worktree metadata you can add a

git worktree prune

You also could use git worktree list --porcelain instead of searching for worktree directories directly - and that may be preferable in odd cases like (again) namespaced branches.

VonC On 14 February 2021 at 04:59

How do I get different worktrees copied into different folders?

That is done with git worktree, as illustrated in Mark Adelsberger's answer.

That answer ends with:

You also could use git worktree list --porcelain instead of searching for worktree directories directly - and that may be preferable in odd cases like (again) namespaced branches.

With Git 2.36 (Q2 2022, see at the end):

git worktree list --porcelain -z

Actually, you should, especially with Git 2.31 (Q1 2021): git worktree list^(man) now annotates worktrees as prunable, shows locked and prunable attributes in --porcelain mode, and gained a --verbose option.

See commit 076b444, commit 9b19a58, commit 862c723, commit 47409e7 (27 Jan 2021), and commit eb36135, commit fc0c7d5, commit a29a8b7 (19 Jan 2021) by Rafael Silva (raffs).
^{(Merged by Junio C Hamano -- gitster -- in commit 02fb216, 10 Feb 2021)}

worktree: teach list verbose mode

^{Helped-by: Eric Sunshine}
^{Signed-off-by: Rafael Silva}
^{Reviewed-by: Eric Sunshine}

"git worktree list"^(man) annotates each worktree according to its state such as prunable or locked, however it is not immediately obvious why these worktrees are being annotated.
For prunable worktrees a reason is available that is returned by should_prune_worktree() and for locked worktrees a reason might be available provided by the user via lock command.

Let's teach "git worktree list" a --verbose mode that outputs the reason why the worktrees are being annotated.
The reason is a text that can take virtually any size and appending the text on the default columned format will make it difficult to extend the command with other annotations and not fit nicely on the screen.
In order to address this shortcoming the annotation is then moved to the next line indented followed by the reason If the reason is not available the annotation stays on the same line as the worktree itself.

The output of "git worktree list" with verbose becomes like so:
$ git worktree list --verbose
...
/path/to/locked-no-reason    acb124 [branch-a] locked
/path/to/locked-with-reason  acc125 [branch-b]
    locked: worktree with a locked reason
/path/to/prunable-reason     ace127 [branch-d]
    prunable: gitdir file points to non-existent location
...