How can git auto-complete branches at the terminal command line?

Question

On my linux machine I have autocomplete for branches with git.

For example I can type git checkout [TAB] and get a list of branches.

Or I can type git checkout feb* [TAB] to get all branches that begin with "feb".

How can I get this functionality on a Mac?

I tried downloading and running bash-completion/bash_completion and bash-completion/bash_completion.sh.in but no joy. The first gave error messages about declare: -A invalid_option. The second gave no errors. When I git checkout [TAB] though I am still getting a list of files in the directory, not branches. I am in the project root.

Auto-complete for directories and bash commands are working ok, so it's specific to git.

Answer 1

ok, so I needed the git autocompletion script.

I got that from this url:

curl https://raw.github.com/git/git/master/contrib/completion/git-completion.bash -o ~/.git-completion.bash

No need to worry about what directory you're in when you run this as your home directory(~) is used with the target.

Then I added to my ~/.bash_profile file the following 'execute if it exists' code:

if [ -f ~/.git-completion.bash ]; then
  . ~/.git-completion.bash
fi

Answer 2

You could install bash and git from MacPorts with the "bash_completion" option enabled. It is probably the easiest way of maintaining both git and the completions up-to-date.

http://denis.tumblr.com/post/71390665/adding-bash-completion-for-git-on-mac-os-x-snow-leopard

To install MacPorts: http://www.macports.org/install.php/

Additional info

As for locating the completion settings on your Linux system, have a look in /etc/bash_completion.d/git (it is a long file). Copying that by itself probably won't work, though, as it is designed to be sourced by the completion framework through /etc/bash_completion (which is sourced from /etc/profile.d/bash_completion.sh; files in /etc/profile.d are sourced from /etc/profile).