Where did I branch from?

Marsellus Wallace picture Marsellus Wallace · Mar 27, 2012 · Viewed 19.8k times · Source

I got back on an old project and I ran the nice git status to figure out what was going on and I noticed way too many branches! I want to do some housekeeping before starting to work on this again but I'm not sure which branch comes from which..

E.G. Does "branchA" derive from "develop"? Does "branchB" derive from "master" or "branchA"??

How can I answer the sample questions above?

Answer

patthoyts picture patthoyts · Mar 28, 2012

git merge-base shows the commit that is the common ancestor of two branches.

Simple usage: git merge-base <branch> <branch> shows the common commit of the two branches.