Question

I have a commit xyz in my local branch that I want to check if it is included in a remote release repository; can I do that in some easy way? I could clone the remote repo, but I’m hoping for a nicer+faster way. git ls-remote seemed promising, but found nothing of value to me there. Thanks!

Answer 1

Let’s suppose that the remote that refers to the remote repository is called origin. In that case, first update all your remote-tracking branches with:

git fetch origin

Now you can use the useful --contains option to git branch to find out which of the remote branches contains that commit:

git branch -r --contains xyz

(The -r means to only show remote-tracking branches.) If the commit xyz is contained in one or more of your remote-tracking branches, you’ll see output like:

  origin/test-suite
  origin/HEAD -> origin/master
  origin/master

If it’s contained in your local repository, but not one of the remote-tracking branches, the output will be empty. However, if that commit isn’t known in your repository at all, you’ll get the error malformed object name and a usage message – perhaps a bit confusing if you’re not expecting it…