Uncommitted Changes

Detect uncommitted changes and derive path-safe branch names for deployment scripts, CI pipelines, and automation tools.

When to use

Use these patterns in automation scripts that depend on repository state — guarding deployments against uncommitted work, generating version names from the current branch, or building deploy-or-abort gates.

The pattern

Detect uncommitted changes

Use git diff to check whether the working tree has modifications. A non-empty result means uncommitted changes exist.

function gitChanges() {
  const { stdout } = run("git", "diff", { sync: true });
  return String(stdout).trim();
}

const uncommittedChanges = gitChanges();
if (uncommittedChanges) {
  console.error(
    "You have uncommitted changes. Commit before deploying."
  );
  process.exit(1);
}

Get a path-safe branch name

Branch names like feature/auth contain slashes that break file paths and URLs. Replace slashes with hyphens to produce a safe identifier.

function gitBranchName() {
  const { stdout } = run(
    "git", "branch --show-current", { sync: true }
  );
  return String(stdout).trim().replaceAll("/", "-");
}

const versionName = gitBranchName();
// "feature/user-auth" → "feature-user-auth"

Combine with a timestamp to build a unique version string:

const version = `${gitBranchName()}-${Date.now()}`;
// "feature-auth-1708300000000"

Combine as a deploy guard

A typical deployment script checks for uncommitted changes first, then derives a default version name from the branch:

const uncommittedChanges = gitChanges();
if (uncommittedChanges) {
  const msg =
    "You have uncommitted changes. Commit before deploying.";
  console.error(new Error(msg));
  process.exit(1);
}

const defaultName = gitBranchName();

Shell variant

The same pattern in shell:

changes=$(git diff)
if [ -n "$changes" ]; then
  echo "Uncommitted changes. Commit before deploying." >&2
  exit 1
fi

branch=$(git branch --show-current \
  | tr '/' '-')
echo "Deploying version: $branch"

In CI pipelines, combine with GitHub Actions error annotations:

if [ -n "$(git diff)" ]; then
  echo "::error::Uncommitted changes detected"
  exit 1
fi

Trade-offs

Approach	Pros	Cons
git diff	Detects all changes	Slow on large repos
git status -s	Faster, includes staged	Needs parsing
git diff --stat	Human-readable summary	Hard to test programmatically
replaceAll	Simple slash replace	Misses other unsafe chars
tr '/' '-'	POSIX-compatible	Only handles slashes