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Home » Wiki » Legal Git branch names

Legal Git branch names

4 weeks ago by Wincent Colaiuta

Overview
A Git branch name can not:

Have a path component that begins with "."

Have a double dot ".."
Have an ASCII control character, "~", "^", ":" or SP, anywhere
End with a "/"
End with ".lock"
Contain a "\" (backslash)
Source: http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/msg133704.html

Source code
The definitive reference for what is a legal ref name (ie. applies to both tags and branches) is the
implementation of the check_ref_format() function in refs.c, along with bad_ref_char() in the
same file. At the current time of writing (19 September 2010) they read as follows:
static inline int bad_ref_char(int ch)
{
if (((unsigned) ch) <= ' ' ||
ch == '~' || ch == '^' || ch == ':' || ch == '\\')
return 1;
/* 2.13 Pattern Matching Notation */
if (ch == '?' || ch == '[') /* Unsupported */
return 1;
if (ch == '*') /* Supported at the end */
return 2;
return 0;
}

int check_ref_format(const char *ref)

{
int ch, level, bad_type, last;
int ret = CHECK_REF_FORMAT_OK;
const char *cp = ref;

level = 0;
while (1) {
while ((ch = *cp++) == '/')
; /* tolerate duplicated slashes */
if (!ch)
/* should not end with slashes */
return CHECK_REF_FORMAT_ERROR;

/* we are at the beginning of the path component */

if (ch == '.')
return CHECK_REF_FORMAT_ERROR;
bad_type = bad_ref_char(ch);
if (bad_type) {
if (bad_type == 2 && (!*cp || *cp == '/') &&
ret == CHECK_REF_FORMAT_OK)
ret = CHECK_REF_FORMAT_WILDCARD;
else
return CHECK_REF_FORMAT_ERROR;
}

last = ch;
/* scan the rest of the path component */
while ((ch = *cp++) != 0) {
bad_type = bad_ref_char(ch);
if (bad_type)
return CHECK_REF_FORMAT_ERROR;
if (ch == '/')
break;
if (last == '.' && ch == '.')
return CHECK_REF_FORMAT_ERROR;
if (last == '@' && ch == '{')
return CHECK_REF_FORMAT_ERROR;
last = ch;
 }
level++;
if (!ch) {
if (ref <= cp - 2 && cp[-2] == '.')
return CHECK_REF_FORMAT_ERROR;
if (level < 2)
return CHECK_REF_FORMAT_ONELEVEL;
if (has_extension(ref, ".lock"))
return CHECK_REF_FORMAT_ERROR;
return ret;
}
}
}

So in addition to the summary posted above, we can also add that:

the sequence @{ is not allowed

? and [ are not allowed
* is allowed only if it constitutes an entire path component (eg. foo/* or bar/*/baz), in which
case it is interpreted as a wildcard and not as part of the actual ref name

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