Sending your Git branch changes as an email attachment

An article by Laurent Kempé 2 Comments

The other day I wanted to send per email some code to a friend which doesn’t use Git. He is using Svn and I use Git Svn in front of this Svn repository. Why I do that? Don’t get me started…

So he couldn’t pull from my repo and we were kind of stuck. Really?!? For sure not, here was the goal I set as I am sure this will happen some other time: having the computer work for me. What a strange idea you would say! Yeah, the computer working for you. At the end aren’t we here to make the cool things and let the computer do the boring things?

Ok so I came up with a quick hack. I wanted to have a way to send all the new, or modified, files of my current Git branch per email as a zip attachment. Guess what it was quite easy even for a PowerShell beginner like me.

First of all I needed first to be able to determine on which Git branch I was curently. I googled and find the following

function Get-GitBranch {
    $symbolicref = git symbolic-ref HEAD
    $branch = $symbolicref.substring($symbolicref.LastIndexOf("/") +1)
    return $branch
}

Then I wanted to be able to Zip all the files, but to achieve I had to determine which were the files to Zip. this is done using the following

git diff --name-only HEAD..master

And making a Zip out of the list of files is done like this

function Zip-GitBranch([string]$zipFilename) {

    $branch = Get-GitBranch
   
    if (!$zipFilename) {
        $zipFilename = [string]::Format(".\{0}.zip", $branch)
    }

    $files = git diff --name-only HEAD..master

    foreach($file in $files) {
         & 'C:\Program Files\7-Zip\7z.exe' a $zipFilename $file
    }
   
    return $zipFilename
}

Finally I wanted to be able to send the zip as an attachment of an email using Outlook

function MailZip-GitBanch($Recipient) {
   
    if (!$Recipient) {
        Write-Host "You need to pass the email of the recipient as parameter"
        return
    }
   
    $branch = Get-GitBranch
    $zipFilename = [string]::Format(".\{0}.zip", $branch)
    $attachement = [IO.Path]::GetFullPath( $zipFilename )

    Zip-GitBranch($attachement)
       
    $ol = New-Object -comObject Outlook.Application
    $Mail = $ol.CreateItem(0)
    $Mail.Recipients.Add($Recipient)
    $Mail.Subject = "Changes for the branch: " + $branch
    $Mail.Body = "Check out the email attachement to see the changes made to the branch: " + $branch
    $Mail.Attachments.Add($attachement)
    $Mail.Send()
}

Now I can type the following command to send my changes to my friend

MailZip-GitBranch myemail@email.com

You can find the whole script on the following gist.