Check if git status is clean inside a Powershell script

Question

I'm developing a Powershell script for create a program release. In order to do it I want to check if the git working tree is clean and there are no uncommitted changes.

I've read this post but it's related to bash.

How can I check from inside a powershell script if the git working tree is clean and there's anything to commit? I don't care about untracked files.

I've tried something like

  $gitOutput = (git status -z) | Out-String
  if ($gitOutput) {
    "output"
  } else {
    "no Output"
  }

The problem is that I print output also when everything is committed but there are some untracked files, that's something that I'd like to avoid. I want to ignore untracked files and check only if all tracked files are committed.

Answer 1

Use git status --porcelain to get the output as a list that's easy to parse.

Untracked files are prefixed with the status ??, so you can easily filter those out and then check if there are uncommitted changes based on whether there is any output left:

if(git status --porcelain |Where {$_ -match '^\?\?'}){
    # untracked files exist
} 
elseif(git status --porcelain |Where {$_ -notmatch '^\?\?'}) {
    # uncommitted changes
}
else {
    # tree is clean
}

Answer 2

git status --porcelain returns git status in an stable, easy-to-parse format.

In my own testing, without additional flags it returns specifically an empty string if there are no modifications to tracked files and also no untracked files. To ignore untracked files, the flag --untracked-files=no may be added. The simple powershell statements below leverage that to yield booleans $hasEditsToTrackedFiles and $hasEditsToTrackedFilesOrHasUntrackedFiles.

Using the --untracked-files=no flag seems a little simpler and easier to understand than doing a regex match. Possibly --short could be used here in place of --porcelain, but i haven't tested it.

$hasEditsToTrackedFiles                    = !([string]::IsNullOrEmpty($(git status --porcelain --untracked-files=no)))
$hasEditsToTrackedFilesOrHasUntrackedFiles = !([string]::IsNullOrEmpty($(git status --porcelain)))