Automate Git Commands Across Repos Using Batch Scripts and Windows Scheduler

For big and small projects alike, I always recommend using a source version control software and a repo for availability, sharing, and managing code.

The drawback, if you work with multiple projects during the day, be it at your work or your personal projects, is that you may spend a good portion of your time managing all the changes, adds, commits, fetchs, and pulls.

To avoid all this additional work, I decided to write some scripts that would help save some time, and still have a good version control implementation.

Writing Scripts to Apply Commands Across Repositories

I store all of my local repositories in a particular directory. I wrote these scripts to automate one or more git commands to run on each repository within that directory. It could also be used to do a general clean up before committing anything to your repository.

Here are two ways to do it.

Method 1:

Use this when you want to store commands in a single file to be executed in sequence for every repo in your directory.

@echo off

for /d %%i in (%cd%\*) do (
    echo *************************************************************************

    echo "%%i"
    cd "%%i"

    echo -----------------------------------------
    echo status
    git status
    echo -----------------------------------------

    echo *************************************************************************
)

cd ..

The script is simple: It’s composed of a single for loop. What you are doing is for each folder inside the current directory, change directory to your local repo and execute the command inside the loop. To execute the exact contents of this script, you would just need to place it in the directory where all your repositories are stored. The echo tags will help to separate the results shown in the Command Window.

You could add any commands you like inside the for loop so you can execute several of them throughout every repository in that directory. A benefit to this approach is that you can also use your git aliases in the very same way.

Method 2:

The first approach described above works well for commands you constantly use while managing your repositories, like git status or git fetch. But storing a different batch file for each git command you want to execute across your repos can also be cumbersome.

With this approach, you can apply a single command across all repositories without the need of storing a batch file for each Git command.

Here, you would need to add a variable that will store the command you want to execute and prompt the user to type it into the console:

@echo off

set /p git_command="Type your command: "

for /d %%i in (%cd%\*) do (
    echo *************************************************************************

    echo "%%i"
    cd "%%i"

    echo -----------------------------------------
    echo %git_command%
    git %git_command%
    echo -----------------------------------------

    echo *************************************************************************
)

cd ..

Automating the Scripts With Windows Scheduler

The benefit of storing batch files with some commands is that you can schedule their execution so that, by the end of the day, all commits done will be pushed to your remote repository, or that at the start of the day, all your local repositories have fetched all the remote changes.

Setting up this task is easy using the Windows Task Scheduler; open the Task Scheduler, click on Create Basic Task, and follow the wizard instructions. The Wizard will allow you to select the frequency of the execution and the time of the day when you want to execute your scripts.

Open the Windows Task Scheduler and click on Create Basic Task:

Set a descriptive Name and Description for the task you would like to schedule.

Select the Trigger configuration that best suits your needs.

*Some of these options will display a sub-menu to further configure the trigger

Select the Start a program option in Action.

In the following Window, give the full path to your batch script.

Finally, a window will show you a summary of the scheduled task.

If everything is correct, click Finish. Everything should be set up and your commands will run on each repo at the frequency you chose.