Written by Matthew
on May 31, 2024

Opening Pull Request links from Terminal

Recently I changed roles which meant leaving GitHub behind and using Bitbucket. There’s many reason why the Git provider switch made me sad but one of main ones was how reliant my workflow had become on the gh CLI.

A colleague and myself have been working on our own Bitbucket PR CLI over at quotidian-ennui/bitbucket-pr, but thats another story.

My normal workflow in GitHub land is:

git co -b feat/cool
# do work
git aa
git cm "feat: something really cool"
git ph
gh pc
# Fill it out in browser

Which translated without git and gh aliases is:

git checkout --branch feat/cool
# do work
git add --all
git commit --message "feat: something really cool"
git push --set-upstream
gh pr create --web
# Fill it out in browser

The last part of the this workflow is the bit that’s hard to replicate. Without taking your hand of the keyboard and clicking the link (lame).

Helpfully most git providers I’ve seen give the URL back in the response when you push, prefixed with remote: , which looks something like this:

Total 0 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0
remote:
remote: Create a pull request for 'feat/something' on GitHub by visiting:
remote:      https://github.com/mcwarman/blog/pull/new/feat/something
remote:
To github.com:mcwarman/blog.git
 * [new branch]      feat/something -> feat/something
branch 'feat/something' set up to track 'origin/feat/something'.

So as the start to many problems I googled it and landed on this StackOverflow post about extracting the url from git push response.

Adapting that what I came up with is this, an awk that extracts the URL prints it to .git/pull-request-url as well as printing the full response.

git push --set-upstream --progress 2>&1 | awk '/^remote:.*https/ { print $2 > ".git/pull-request-url" }{ print }';

Then we can use www-browser (which for me is wslview under the covers):

www-browser $(cat .git/pull-request-url);

Now with the new commands we can turn them into git aliases by wrapping them in shell functions f() { ...; }; f and using ! as prefix which allows you to run external commands in a git alias:

# ~/.gitconfig
[alias]
  ph = "!f() { git push -u --progress 2>&1 | awk '/^remote:.*https/ { print $2 > \".git/pull-request-url\" }{ print }'; }; f"
  pr = "!f() { www-browser $(cat .git/pull-request-url); }; f"

The end of my new workflow now looks like this, with the added bonus of working both on GitHub and Bitbucket.

git ph
git pr
# Fill it out in browser

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