Is there a way to git push, but, if the branch doesn't exist in the remote, throw an error or exit non-zero instead of creating a new branch on the server?
The use case is the following. I am creating scripts to help automate the scm workflow in my company. If someone accidentally mistypes a branch name as input into the script, I don't want a new branch created on the remote. I already can manually check remote branch existence, but I wondered if git supports this feature.
No, there is currently not a way to do this with a single call to git-push.
Possible workarounds:
Existence of a remote branch can be checked like this:
#!/bin/bash
if ! git ls-remote --exit-code $remote /refs/heads/$branch
then
echo >&2 "Error: Remote branch does not exist"
exit 1
fi
exit 0
Which could be included in a pre-push hook as well if desired. Something like this (place in .git/hooks/pre-push):
#!/bin/sh
remote="$1"
url="$2"
while read local_ref local_sha remote_ref remote_sha
do
if ! git ls-remote --exit-code $url $remote_ref
then
echo >&2 "Remote branch does not exist, not pushing"
exit 1
fi
done
exit 0
Which will cause the desired behavior:
$ git push origin master:branch_that_does_not_exist
Remote branch does not exist, not pushing
error: failed to push some refs to 'git@github.com:some/repository.git'
If you have access to the server you can also create a pre-recieve hook to reject creation of new branches.