Find a git repo on your system by its remote URL

If you cloned a repo but can't find it on your system, surely you can figure out where it is?

1. list all git repos by searching for directories called .git

• better yet, make an index of all such directories

2. use git remote show origin to show the repo source (i.e. GitHub URL: user/org and repo name)

---

• findafile is a function: find / -iname "$@" 2> /dev/null

• findafile .git lists all git repos

• findafile .git | head -4 returns a list (to figure it out I'm just getting a few with head)

  /gits/getpaperstmp/.git
  /gits/grc-issues-backup/.git
  /gits/euler/.git
  /gits/websiteresources/.git
  

• git-config is the tool to query a repo's .git/config file, which has a line with the URL in, e.g. for this repository wiki (yes, you can clone a GitHub wiki!)

  [core]
          repositoryformatversion = 0
          filemode = true
          bare = false
          logallrefupdates = true
  [remote "origin"]
          url = git@github.com:lmmx/devnotes.wiki.git
          fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
  [branch "master"]
          remote = origin
          merge = refs/heads/master
  

  • get the parameter by calling git config --get remote.origin.url if inside the directory above .git/,
  • or point it at the directory using the --git-dir flag: git --git-dir=devnotes.wiki/.git config --get remote.origin.url

• So... to do this for a list, such as the one I took the head of above, apply a call to xargs,

  findafile .git | head -4 | xargs -I {} git --git-dir={} config --get remote.origin.url

• an improvement would be to print out say, tab-separated columns of the directory and the remote URL, but I can't quite see how to do this

  • if you rename the {} argument by placing a variable name to use after it and replacing the --git-dir flag parameter with said word, the word isn't parsed (e.g. declaring 'gitdir' as the variable reports "xargs: gitdir: No such file or directory")

• since you can't (?) do that, it's fine to just run the call twice (kinda defeats the purpose of calling xargs but whatever - for the purpose I'm writing this for, I just want to grep to see if a certain repo URL exists, i.e. if I have it on my computer, so it'll do)

Fin!

Extension: keeping a list to query

• making an index saves running this command which is kind of slow
• see https://github.com/spin-arb/in