Harness the Combinatoric Power of Command-Line Tools and Utilities
Jump to Git Repository Root
Published May 13, 2024
❗ This article is more than six months old. Some things may not work as written.
If you’re working on a project in the CLI and you’ve navigated to a subfolder, you might want a quick way to navigate back to the project root. You can use a combination of pushd and popd to jump around your shell, but there’s a faster way if your project is a Git repository.
The command git rev-parse --show-toplevel will tell you the path to the top-level directory of a repository. You can feed the result of that command to the cd command to jump to that folder:
cd $(git rev-parse --show-toplevel)That command is way too long to remember, so create an alias for it.
With the Bash shell, add an alias by adding the following line to ~/.bashrc on Linux or ~/.bash_profile on macOS:
alias cdr='cd $(git rev-parse --show-toplevel)'
If you use zsh, add the alias to ~/.zshrc.
When you open a new terminal window or source your configuration file, you can use the command cdr to jump to the project root.
When working in a large monorepo with subprojects, like sample code for a book or course, this is a huge time saver.