Question

I’m trying to make a deploy command in my Makefile, which simply overwrites to the branch deployment and then pushes this branch to origin.

However, the command must stop/fail with an error message when the working tree is not empty.

Something like the following:

deploy:

    status=$(git status --porcelain)
    test "x$(status)" = "x"
    git branch -f deployment
    git push origin deployment

Unfortunately, this test on and status variable do not seem to function as wanted.

How would one achieve this? Am I indeed supposed to use test?

Answer 1

Use git diff-index to check if the repo is dirty:

deploy:
        git diff-index --quiet HEAD 
        git branch -f deployment
        git push origin deployment

If you want to check shell variables in a makefile, you need to ensure that you check the value of the variable in the same shell as the one in which it is set. Make will invoke each command in a separate shell, so you would need to do something like:

deploy:
        @status=$$(git status --porcelain); \
        if test "x$${status}" = x; then \
            git branch -f deployment; \
            git push origin deployment; \
        else \
            echo Working directory is dirty >&2; \
        fi

Note the double ‘$’, the semi-colon, and the line continuations.