git alias to pull --rebase current branch

Question

I am working on a branch called foo and I want to rebase my branch against origin/foo . In modern versions of git I could run

$ git pull --rebase origin foo

That's a lot of typing for a common operation. Additionally, because I have an old version of git (see this ), I also need to run a fetch first so that my local graph doesn't seem confusing:

$ git fetch && git pull --rebase origin foo

How can I write that as a git alias?

Answer 1

The command

git symbolic-ref --short HEAD

outputs the short name of the current branch, if any (or HEAD , if the HEAD is detached). Therefore, you can use it inside a command substitution in your alias definition:

git config --global alias.<name> '!git fetch && git pull --rebase origin $(git symbolic-ref --short HEAD)'

where <name> stands for your alias's name.