Quickly Copy the Latest Commit URL

From time to time, it’s helpful to send a coworker the GitHub commit URL for the latest commit in a repository. While you can navigate to GitHub, find the commit links, and manually copy it, using a custom CLI command makes this super easy!

The script to copy the commit URL is pretty simple, but it handles all the complexity of parsing the remote URL into a proper URL.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
​
# Default to the latest commit if no commit was provided
commit=${1:-$(git rev-parse --short HEAD)}
​
# Read the repo base URL from the git config
url=$(git config --get remote.origin.url)
​
# Take the git@hostname.com:account/repo.git format and turn it into
# https://hostname.com/account/repo/commit/...
if [[ $url != "https://"* ]]; then
	url=$(echo "$url" | sed 's/\.git$//' | sed 's/:/\//' | sed 's/^git@/https:\/\//')
fi
​
echo "$url/commit/$commit"

Now we can print the commit URL in our terminal by running the following command:

commit-url

The script is nice enough to support passing a commit URL, which is useful to get the full GitHub URL for a given commit hash.

commit-url 0dbad3ee

Bonus tip!

The base commit-url command will print the commit URL, which makes the command very robust allowing us to pipe the output into other commands or including it in a larger shell script. But often we just want to copy the URL to our clipboard.

Like many of my other bash commands, I solve this by adding a similarly named script that will copy the result of the command to the clipboard automatically.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
​
commit-url "$1" | pbcopy

Now we can simply add an exclamation point when running the command and we’ll copy it to the clipboard instead of printing it. Neat, right!?

commit-url!

Want to learn more about shell scripts? Take a look at my full-length blog post about embracing shell scripts to improve your developer workflow.