How to get SHA of the latest commit from remote git repository?
git
Solution
If you want to check SHA-1 of given branch in remote repository, then your answer is correct:
$ git ls-remote <URL>
However if you are on the same filesystem simpler solution (not requiring to extract SHA-1 from output) would be simply:
$ git --git-dir=/path/to/repo/.git rev-parse origin/branch_X
See git(1) manpage for description of '`--git-dir`' option.
Problem
Does anyone know how to get the latest SHA of a given branch from outside a git repository? If you are inside a git repository, you can do: ``` git log origin/branch_X | head -1 ``` However, I am not inside a git repository, and I would like to avoid having to `clone` a repository just to get the latest SHA of a tag/branch. Is there a clever way of doing this?