This post will discuss how to determine the current branch name in Git.

There are several ways to get the name of the current branch in Git:

1. git-branch

We can use the --show-current option of the git-branch command to print the current branch’s name.

$ git branch --show-current

git branch --show-current

Alternatively, you can grep the output returned by git-branch and extract the current branch name, as shown below:

git branch grep

2. git-rev-parse

Another plausible way of retrieving the name of the current branch is with git-rev-parse. This can be used with the --abbrev-ref option, as shown below:

$ git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD

git rev-parse

3. git-symbolic-ref

Another simple and fairly efficient solution is to use the git-symbolic-ref to display the short symbolic reference to the current branch’s HEAD, which is nothing but the current branch name.

$ git symbolic-ref --short HEAD

git symbolic-ref HEAD

4. git-name-rev

Finally, you can find the symbolic name for HEAD revision of the current branch by git-name-rev when used with the --name-only flag:

$ git name-rev --name-only HEAD

git name-rev

That’s all about finding the current branch name in Git.