List of branches a commit appears on

Question

Using the GitHub API (v3) I'd like to figure out which branches a commit appears on. I didn't find a way to directly query this, either through repo commits or the commit data objects. An alternate solution would be to list all the branches, and compare with their HEAD; I guess the comparison would fail if the commit is not on the given branch.

Is this supported via the current API, and I just missed it? If not, do you have a (better) workaround?

Answer 1

That's not possible directly via the GitHub API.

Workaround 1:

1. get a list of all branches
2. for each branch, get a list of commits on that branch
3. check if the commit is in the list of commits for each branch

Workaround 2 (I think this will work, but not 100% sure if I missed a case):

1. get a list of all branches

2. for each branch, compare the branch with the SHA:

   https://api.github.com/repos/:user/:repo/compare/:branch...:sha_of_commit

3. If the value of the status attribute in the response is diverged or ahead, then the commit is not in the branch. If the value of the status attribute is behind or identical, then the commit is in the branch.