Homebrew’s `git` not using completion

When using OSX’s git, after I modify a file I can simply do git commit <tab>, and that’ll auto complete the file’s name to the one that was modified. However, if I install a newer version of git from homebrew and I use it, that feature no longer works (meaning I press <tab> and it just “asks” me what file I want to do it on, even including the ones that have no changes).

Can anyone shed some light as to why, and how to solve that? I’d prefer using homebrew’s git, since it’s more up-to-date.

My shell is zsh, and Neither installing bash-completion or zsh-completions worked (even after following homebrew’s post-install instructions).

Also, after installing git with homebrew it says

Bash completion has been installed to: /usr/local/etc/bash_completion.d
zsh completion has been installed to: /usr/local/share/zsh/site-functions

So shouldn’t I be able to use one of those?

You're looking for:

brew install git bash-completion

As warpc's comment states, you'll need to add the following to your ~/.bash_profile to get homebrew's bash-completion working:

if [ -f $(brew --prefix)/etc/bash_completion ]; then
    . $(brew --prefix)/etc/bash_completion
fi

The above is mentioned in the caveats when you install the bash-completion formula.

---

Note: if you are using Bash v4 or later (via brew install bash) then you're going to want to use brew install bash-completion@2, to enable tab completion add the following to ~/.bash_profile as described in the caveats:

export BASH_COMPLETION_COMPAT_DIR="/usr/local/etc/bash_completion.d"
[[ -r "/usr/local/etc/profile.d/bash_completion.sh" ]] && . "/usr/local/etc/profile.d/bash_completion.sh"

The additional export is necessary for git, docker, youtube-dl, and other completions which may be included in the $(brew --prefix)/etc/bash_completion.d/ directory.

This get's git tab completion working on OSX without having to restart your terminal:

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/git/git/master/contrib/completion/git-completion.bash -o ~/.git-completion.bash
echo "source ~/.git-completion.bash" >> ~/.bash_profile
source ~/.bash_profile

EDIT: this doesn't work in Catalina's default zsh shell. I changed the default shell back to bash and it works again. https://www.howtogeek.com/444596/how-to-change-the-default-shell-to-bash-in-macos-catalina/

In case anyone else makes my dumb mistake, try brew install git. I was using the git that comes with Xcode and didn't realize that I had never installed Homebrew's git to get the autocompletions.

for some reason I was missing the file at $(brew --prefix)/etc/bash_completion so @Graham Perks' correct answer didn't work for me

It ended up the fix in my case was:

brew unlink bash-completion
brew link bash-completion

I solved the problem by figuring out that $(brew --prefix)/etc/bash_completion returned Permission denied when executed. So after a simple:

chmod +x $(brew --prefix)/etc/bash_completion

Everything is now working fine. I'm wondering why Homebrew doesn't make the bash_completion file executable on installation, though.

I had the same issue and even found this post this morning. I fixed the issue by updating brew with brew update and then reinstalling git with brew reinstall git.

I was then notified of another file that is blocking the homebrew linking process, in my case it was /usr/local/share/zsh/site-functions/git-completion.bash. Removing the file and running brew link git solved the issue. Guessing it was just a bad recipe version we stumbled upon.

Found a working solution. It's very recent (authored 16 hours ago, and committed 2 hours ago), and it comes directly from homebrew.

brew install git --without-completions

Just tried it, and it finally works as intended.

For bash on macOS Catalina (3/30 update: Big Sur too), if you want to also use Bash 5 from homebrew, you need to make sure that your login shell is set to homebrew's bash, and not the default.

To check if you need to do this, run echo ${BASH_VERSION}. If you see a version starting with 3, you are not using Brew's bash for your login shell.

To change this,

1. Open System Preferences->Users and Groups.
2. Right click your user and select "Advanced Options". You may need to unlock this with your password by clicking the lock in the bottom left.
3. Set the login shell field to the location of your brew's bash, which you can usually find by running which bash in a terminal after you install brew's bash. Mine was /usr/local/bin/bash.

Restart your terminal, and follow the instructions in this excellent answer

Step 1: Download auto completion script:

cd ~
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/git/git/master/contrib/completion/git-completion.bash

Step 2: Update .bash_profile and .bashrc

echo "source ~/git-completion.bash" >> .bash_profile

Via https://www.anintegratedworld.com/git-tab-autocomplete-on-osx-10-11-el-capitan/

If above does not work, try https://github.com/bobthecow/git-flow-completion/wiki/Install-Bash-git-completion

If you have $BASH_VERSION < 4.1, eg 3.2.57(1)-release then go ahead with:

brew install bash-completion
# In ~/.bash_profile :
if [ -f $(brew --prefix)/etc/bash_completion ]; then
    . $(brew --prefix)/etc/bash_completion
fi

However if you've brew install bash to get version 4.4.12(1)-release you can use the better and more complete completions in:

brew install bash-completion@2
# In ~/.bash_profile:
[ -f "$(brew --prefix)/share/bash-completion/bash_completion" ] \
&& . "$(brew --prefix)/share/bash-completion/bash_completion"

Note that some packages (brew, docker, tmux) will still put some completions into $(brew --prefix)/etc/bash_completion.d/ so you might add:

for completion in "$(brew --prefix)/etc/bash_completion.d/"*
do
    . $completion
done

Finally you should be able to add the git completion script if for some reason the way you installed git did not add it to either of those:

[[ -f $(brew --prefix)/etc/bash_completion.d/git \
|| -f $(brew --prefix)/share/bash-completion/completions/git ]] \
|| curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/git/git/master/contrib/completion/git-completion.bash \
    -o $(brew --prefix)/etc/bash_completion.d/git

You can get and add it with the above.

In 2019, using Bash v5, you do not need to explicitly source the git bash completion script in your .bash_profile or .bashrc

1. Ensure you have the following two lines in your .bashrc

export BASH_COMPLETION_COMPAT_DIR="/usr/local/etc/bash_completion.d"
[[ -r "/usr/local/etc/profile.d/bash_completion.sh" ]] && . "/usr/local/etc/profile.d/bash_completion.sh"

2. Download the git bash completion script (https://raw.githubusercontent.com/git/git/master/contrib/completion/git-completion.bash) and save it to /usr/local/etc/bash_completion.d/ as git

That's it! Bash will automatically pick up the git completion file and enable completion.

---

Side Note: I recommend putting all these changes in .bashrc as this ensures that when you drop into an interactive shell (ie. from pipenv shell), completions will get loaded correctly as bash will source .bashrc and NOT .bash_profile.

For me , I had to put

source $(brew --prefix)/etc/bash_completion

into .bashrc (not .bash_profile) to get this to work.

".bash_profile is executed for login shells, while .bashrc is executed for interactive non-login shells" -- from [What is the difference between .bash_profile and .bashrc?] It appears to me that MacOS Sierra doesn't execute .bash_profile when opening a new terminal window, only .bashrc.

I wouldn't put it in _bash_profile, because then I'd have to reboot/logout for updates to take effect.

[What is the difference between .bash_profile and .bashrc?]: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/51036/what-is-the-difference-between-bash-profile-and-bashrc "What is the difference between .bash_profile and .bashrc?"

This worked for me in Mojave (OSX 10.14.1):

brew install bash-completion

Then add the following line to your ~/.bash_profile:

[ -f /usr/local/etc/bash_completion ] && . /usr/local/etc/bash_completion

It may have something to do with libedit being used instead of readline in Lion.

Try installing readline before git.

brew install readline

For those who already have brew bash-completion installed. I did not have the git completion script installed and could not find any tap for that.

So I added it manually:

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/git/git/master/contrib/completion/git-completion.bash -o $(brew --prefix)/etc/bash_completion.d/git

Note that you have to rename the file and remove the extension for it to work.

If you do not have completion or git installed, install it in the accepted answer.

brew install git bash-completion

If you used homebrew to install git, then probably there is no need to install anything to support git completion. "git-completion.bash" file is somewhere (mine was here: /usr/local/git/contrib/completion/git-completion.bash)

All you need to do is to find the file: sudo find / -type f -name "git-completion.bash"

Then source its path in your .bash_profile. For example I needed to add this line to my ~/.bash_profile:

source /usr/local/git/contrib/completion/git-completion.bash

Don't forget to source your ~/.bash_profile or reopen your terminal ;)

from: how-enable-git-tab-completion-bash-mac-os-x

I know this is an old post, but you don't really need to install any additional packages.

Homebrew is informing you that there is a directory with all the stuff you need.

You can simply add the following line to your .bash_profile if you are using Bash:

source /usr/local/etc/bash_completion.d/git-completion.bash

If nothing works, it could be because you have an older version of bash and bash completion script is not getting sourced by the /usr/local/etc/profile.d/bash_completion.sh script. You can test this by adding a simple echo inside the conditionals in file /usr/local/etc/profile.d/bash_completion.sh:

 10         if shopt -q progcomp && [ -r /usr/local/Cellar/bash-completion@2/2.11/share/bash-completion/bash_completion ]; then
 11             # Source completion code.
                echo "doing bash completion or not"
 12             . /usr/local/Cellar/bash-completion@2/2.11/share/bash-completion/bash_completion

And open a new terminal. If you don't see the echo message, then the conditionals do not evaluate to true. In my case it was because the bash version was old, the default from mac 3.2.blah.

I did install a newer bash from brew, but i forgot to chsh and that caused me a lot of headache. bash --version would return 5.1.8 but the enabled shell was still the old one :) To test the enabled bash you can do

for n in {0..5}
do
  echo "BASH_VERSINFO[$n] = ${BASH_VERSINFO[$n]}"
done

The fix was to sudo chsh -s /usr/local/bin/bash After which the completions worked.

After tearing my hair out over this one for ages, I discovered that when I had the hub command installed, the completions for the hub command were breaking the completions for git. I had to remove /usr/local/etc/bash_completion.d/hub.bash_completion.sh. This meant no completions for hub, but git completions now worked. I didn't debug why this was.

I had the following brew packages installed:

• bash: 5.1.16
• bash-completion@2: 2.11
• git: 2.35.1
• hub: 2.14.2

Enable Auto Completion of GIT commands on MAC-OS Mojave 10.14 I am a developer and use GIT from the command line all of the time. When I consider the development perspective, I used to execute a lot of commands using the command line for GIT operations. Most of the time it is very annoying that MAC OS doesn't have automatic support for the command completion which I partially support. as well as the command suggestions, which means what are the commands available for typed characters. So it is very troublesome to type very long command and mostly repetitive task as typo going wrong. :(

Tab completion would certainly be faster and easier. Unfortunately, the default installation of git on some Mac computers doesn't have tab completion enabled.

So that I was searching for a fix for the problem and there are several solutions found from the web search such as StackOverflow, GitHub as well as from the medium. Unfortunately, those solutions did not work for me and got frustrated with trying different solutions so many times.

I was searching deeply and trying out different solutions and fortunately, it is an easy fix. Below are the steps I have collected from several posts and finally it worked as expected. So I hope to share with others who have this problem like me.

f you go to the web search and you can find many solutions which mentioned the git completion bash file. Even GitHub guide as well. But I suggest you check first if the git-completion.bash file is already in your MAC computer with the git-core or something else which came from installation. you can use below command.

sudo find / -type f -name "git-completion.bash"

you will get below results. (may have some difference according to the content)

/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr/share/git-core/git-completion.bash
/Users/Dilanka/git-completion.bash
/Users/Dilanka/.oh-my-zsh/plugins/gitfast/git-completion.bash
/Users/Dilanka/Downloads/git-completion.bash

I suggest you to pick which installed from git-core

If the git-completion.bash script doesn't exist on your machine, please retrieve it from the below provided above and save it to your local machine in a new file called git-completion.bash in the /usr/local/etc/bash_completion.d/ directory.

https://git-scm.com/book/en/v1/Git-Basics-Tips-and-Tricks

If you use the Bash shell, Git comes with a nice auto-completion script you can enable. Download it directly from the Git source code at

https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/contrib/completion/git-completion.bash

If the git-completion.bash script exists on your machine, but is not in the /usr/local/etc/bash_completion.d/ directory, you should create that directory and copy the file into it. Below command will do the job:

sudo mkdir /opt/local/etc/bash_completion.d
sudo cp /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr/share/git-core/git-completion.bash /usr/local/etc/bash_completion.d/git-completion.bash

After the completion of above. The git-completion.bash script should exist on your local machine in the/usr/local/etc/bash_completion.d/ directory.

Now you need to refresh your profile using below command. It will load your added bash file to the terminal context.

source ~/.bash_profile

Great!!! you have done it. Just start the terminal window and try it. Just type "git sta" it will show suggestions as below:

git sta
stage    stash    status
git chec<TAB> will show git checkout

see my GitHub post here:

https://github.com/DIL8654/Enable-Auto-Completion-of-GIT-commads-on-MAC-OS-Mojave

See my Medium post here:

https://medium.com/@dilanka85/enable-auto-completion-of-git-commands-on-mac-os-mojave-10-14