Most git workflows involve use of multiple branches for different sub-tasks, example, a new branch for an alternative layout for the homepage. However, managing braches on the server quicky gets tedious – SSHing in, navigation to the correct directory, then running git checkout <branch> – is tiring for all, right?.

That’s why I came up with a simple solution that used PHP and GET requests to checkout different branches on the server through the browser.

The Concept

What we’re trying to achieve here is:

  1. An easy way to pass a branch name to a script.
  2. That script uses that branch name to run a checkout in the correct directory.
  3. The output of the command is presented to us, to tell if it ran correctly or not.

Doing this with a small, but powerful, PHP script is our challenge.

The Code

GET Request

We’ll be passing variables as GET requests, because:

  1. It’s easy.
  2. It’s lazy.

So just make a variable holding the GET variable in your PHP

$branchname = $_GET['branch'];

We’ll also need to check if the user has actually supplied a request, if not, echo a helpful message and stop the script from executing further.

if (!$branchname) {  
  echo "Please enter a branchname, ?branch=<name>";
  return false;
}

Executing the command

We need to cd into the correct directory and run git checkout $branchname. We do that using shell_exec().

$command = 'cd <directory> && git checkout ' . $branchname;
$output = shell_exec($command . ' 2>&1');

You might not need to change directory, so feel free to remove cd <directory>. The rest is essential. 2>&1 directs stderr to stdout (Or put simply, outputs the result of the command).

Printing the output would be extremely helpful as well:

echo 'Checking out ' . $branchname . '&hellip;<br>';  
echo $output . '<br>';

And we’re done. Upload it to your server with a filename like checkout-git-branch.php, and try it out!

Final code

<?php

$branchname = $_GET['branch'];

if (!$branchname) {  
  echo "Please enter a branchname, ?branch=<name>";
  return false;
}

$command = 'cd <directory> && git checkout ' . $branchname;
$output = shell_exec($command . ' 2>&1');

echo 'Checking out ' . $branchname . '&hellip;<br>';  
echo $output . '<br>';  
?>