In GIT: how to get SHA of the latest commit from outside the repository?

Question

Does anyone know how to get the latest SHA of a given branch FROM OUTSIDE a git repository?

If you are inside git repository, it’s you can do: git log origin/branch_X | head -1

However, I am not inside a git repository, and I would like to avoid having to “clone” a repository just to get the latest SHA of a tag/branch. Is there a clever way of doing this?

Thanks!

-Steve

Answer 1

A colleague of mine answered this for me:

git ls-remote ssh://git.dev.pages/opt/git/repos/dev.git

-Steve

Answer 2

References to branch heads are stored in the .git/refs/ tree. So you should be able to find the hash of the latest commit at:

cat .git/refs/remotes/origin/branch_X

Your path may differ slightly.

Answer 3

If you want to check SHA-1 of given branch in remote repositoy, then your answer is correct:

$ git ls-remote <URL>

However if you are on the same filesystem simpler solution (not requiring to extract SHA-1 from output) would be simply:

$ git --git-dir=/path/to/repo/.git rev-parse origin/branch_X

See git(1) manpage for description of '--git-dir' option.

Answer 4

If you just want the SHA-1 from the currently checked out branch of your local repo, you can just specify HEAD instead of origin/branch_X:

git --git-dir=/path/to/repo/.git rev-parse --verify HEAD