Question

How can I tell if a given directory is part of a git respository?

(The following is in python, but bash or something would be fine.)

os.path.isdir('.svn')

will tell you if the current directory is controlled by Subversion. Mercurial and Git just have a .hg/.git at the top of the repository, so for hg I can use

os.system('hg -q stat 2> /dev/null > /dev/null') == 0)

but git status returns a nonzero (error) exit status if nothing’s changed.

Is iterating up the path looking for .git myself the best I can do?

Answer 1

In ruby, system('git rev-parse') will return true if the current directory is in a git repo, and false otherwise. I imagine the pythonic equivalent should work similarly.

EDIT: Sure enough:

# in a git repo, running ipython
>>> system('git rev-parse')
0

# not in a git repo
>>> system('git rev-parse')
32768

Note that there is some output on STDERR when you aren’t in a repo, if that matters to you.