A handy aliased function for creating new git repos

by David Yates

I often have to create new git repos and while the instructions that Github provides are fine, I find myself typing the same commands over and over again. So I decided to create a handy function that I can call from the command line to create a new repo and push it to Github.

First of all open your .bashrc file (I use ~/.zshrc, but wherever you keep your aliases is fine) and add the following function:

gitinit() (
     if [[ ! "$1" ]] ; then
        echo "You must supply a git origin e.g. [email protected]:yourusername/your-repo.git"
        echo "If you haven't created a repo yet, do that first -> https://github.com/new"
        return 0
    fi
    git init
    git add .
    git commit -m "Initial commit"
    git branch -M main
    git remote add origin $1
    git push -u origin main
)

Source the file to make the function available in your current shell session:


source ~/.zshrc # or whatever your file is called

You can also restart your terminal if you prefer.

Now you can create a new repo and push it to Github with a single command:

gitinit [email protected]:yourusername/your-repo.git

Bear in mind that you’ll still need to create the repo on Github first.

Maybe I’ll automate that the next time I need to do it 🙂.

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