Update all Git repositories

Over the years I’ve been working to move more and more of the content into version control. This spans both my development work and writing for this site and books/documents. However, as I switch between multiple computers where I will use one as my day-to-day driver and a second one for when I’m travelling to and from work, ensuring that I keep all the repos up to date can be an issue. I also use a varient of this on my phone to ensure everything is kept up to date on there as well.

For this reason, I have created a bash script that I can use on my laptops to iterate through all of my repos and pull down the latest commits. While this is not necessarily best practice, it suits my purposes and I imagine that it will be something that will be helpful for a large number of other people, hence creating this.

The code

Below is the code that I use to go through my code folder and update any repos in there, personally I have this file saved as update_all_repos.sh.

#!/bin/bash
for d in ${PWD}/*/ ; do
    echo "$d"
    cd "$d"
    if [ -d .git ]; then
        git pull
    fi;
done

The first line of interest is for d in ${PWD}/*/ ; do, this starts off the for loop for each directory. The ${PWD} is used to get the current directory, avoiding us hardcoding the current directory.

We then print out the directory name and change directory. While not necessary when running in the background, I found that having it print out the directory helps to make it clearer in the output if there were any errors.

One thing that caught me out was not putting quotes around the directory. This led to the code not working occasionally when there was a space in the directory name.

While all of my folders in my source code directory are Git repositories, I thought it would be worth checking to see if it is a Git repo before I try and perform the pull. The if [ -d .git ]; then checks to see whether there is a .git folder in the directory and only, in that case, will it perform a pull.

Running the script

To run the script, the first thing you will need to do is make the script executable

chmod +x update_all_repos.sh

Once this has been completed you’re able to run the script by running ./update_all_repos.sh.