git-alias

git alias [options]git alias [options] search-patterngit alias [options] alias-name command

git alias is a git-extras helper for managing the [alias] section of your git config. It is a thin wrapper around git config, but with a syntax short enough to use casually.With no arguments it lists every alias git can see, formatted as name = command and sorted. With one argument it filters that list. With two it creates an alias: git alias co checkout makes git co run git checkout.An alias whose command starts with ! is run as a shell command rather than a git subcommand, which is how aliases that chain commands or take arguments are written.Without --global or --local, listing shows the merged view of all config levels, and creating writes wherever plain git config would, which is normally the repository's .git/config when you are inside a repository.

--global

Show or create the alias in the global (user) config.

Show or create the alias in the repository config.

Show only aliases matching this pattern. It is passed to grep, so it is a regular expression, not a glob.

Create an alias mapping alias-name to command.

~/.gitconfig

Global aliases, written by --global, in the [alias] section.

Repository-local aliases, written by --local.

The --global option writes to your user config (~/.gitconfig), despite the built-in help describing it as "the system config". True system-wide config is git config --system, which this wrapper does not expose.Creating an alias silently overwrites an existing one of the same name; there is no confirmation and no way to undo it other than rewriting the value.The search pattern goes to grep unquoted, so characters like . and ***** are regex metacharacters and match more than you might expect.Aliases cannot shadow built-in git commands. git alias status "log" is accepted by the config but git will keep running the real status.Passing more than two arguments is an error, so a multi-word command must be quoted as a single argument.

git alias is part of git-extras, created by TJ Holowaychuk in 2010 and now community-maintained. Git's own alias mechanism, which this wraps, has existed in git config since the early days of git.

git-config(1), git-extras(1), git(1)

Source code · Documentation