Recently I had to give a few colleagues a tutorial on how to figure out which branches a particular commit has been applied to in a Git repository. Not hard-core git by any means, but useful nonetheless.
Local Repos
If you want to see which branches in your local repo contain a commit use this command:
git branch --contains <commit SHA>
The results, if there are any, should be a list of local branches :
env_stage
feature_branch1
feature_branch1-TO-master
feature_branch1-TO-other_branch
other_feature_branch
In the example above the commit I'm looking for was a part of the work done on "feature_branch1", which has been merged to other_branch and master using merge branches. Since the changes were pulled into master (and I'm constantly pulling master to get the latest changes) the next time I branched from master to work on a new feature (other_feature_branch) the commits from feature_branch1 were included.
Remote Repos
If you want to see which branches on your remote repo(s) contain a commit simply add the -r switch to the command:
git branch -r --contains <commit SHA>
The results, if there are any, should be a list of fully-qualified branch names:
origin/master
origin/feature_branch1
origin/feature_branch1-TO-master
origin/feature_branch1-TO-other_branch
origin/acid_burn
origin/crash_override
origin/zero_cool
In this case it appears that the work that was done on featurebranch1 and has been pull-requested to stage, and 3 new branches have been started since: acid_burn, crash_override, and zero_cool. It would be awesome if the engineer responsible for feature_branch1-TO-env_stage and feature_branch1-TO-other_branch would delete those merge branches since we still have the feature branch, and the changes have been merged to master. feature_branch1 should not be deleted until that feature ships.