Determine if directory is under git control

Question

How can I tell if a given directory is part of a git respository? (The following is in python, but bash or something would be fine.) ``` os.path.isdir('.svn') ``` will tell you if the current directory is controlled by Subversion. Mercurial and Git just have a .hg/.git at the top of the repository, so for `hg` I can use ``` os.system('hg -q stat 2> /dev/null > /dev/null') == 0) ``` but `git status` returns a nonzero (error) exit status if nothing's changed. Is iterating up the path looking for `.git` myself the best I can do?

Accepted Answer

In ruby, `system('git rev-parse')` will return true if the current directory is in a git repo, and false otherwise. I imagine the pythonic equivalent should work similarly.

EDIT: Sure enough:

```
# in a git repo, running ipython
>>> system('git rev-parse')
0

# not in a git repo
>>> system('git rev-parse')
32768
```

Note that there is some output on STDERR when you aren't in a repo, if that matters to you.

Determine if directory is under git control

Solution

Problem