Table of Contents

• Workflow
• Scope
• Installation
  • GIT
• Usage
  • Arguments
  • Help
  • Repository
  • Branches
  • Commands
  • Rebase
  • Purge
  • Aggregate

Workflow

This script will facilitate adopting a subset of the branch-featuring workflow characterised by:

• each feature will have its own branch
• feature branches derive directly form master
• integration of master to feature branch happens via rebasing
• release branches are created aggregating multiple branches into a new one

Scope

The scope of this gem is helping out in the following cases:

• you have multiple feature branches waiting for release due to some reason (i.e. long QA time...), and need to keep them aligned with master
• you need to quickly aggregate branches for a release

Installation

Just install the gem to use the binaries commands.

gem install git_commands

GIT

The library uses the Ruby command line execution to invoke the git command as a separate process.
I assume you have the GIT program on your path.

Usage

Here are the main commands:

Arguments

All of the available commands come with the same set of arguments:

Help

Display the help of a specific command by:

rebase --help
Usage: rebase --repo=./Sites/oro --branches=feature/add_bin,fetaure/remove_rake_task
    -r, --repo=REPO                  The path to the existing GIT repository
    -b, --branches=BRANCHES          The comma-separated list of branches or the path to a file listing branches names on each line
    -h, --help                       Prints this help

Repository

You have to specify the path (absolute or relative) to the GIT repository you want to work with. The path must be a folder initialized as a valid GIT repository (a check via rev-parse is performed), otherwise an error is raised:

rebase --repo=invalid
'invalid' is not a valid GIT repository!

Branches

Along with the repository you always have to specify the list of branches you want the command to interact with.
You have two main options here:

List of branches

Specify a comma separated list of branch names:

rebase --branches=feature/love_me_tender,feature/teddybear,feature/return_to_sender

Loading branches file...
Successfully loaded 3 branches:
01. feature/love_me_tender
02. feature/teddybear
03. feature/return_to_sender

Path to a names file

Specify a path (absolute or relative) to a file containing the branches names on each line:

File ./Sites/greatest_hits:

feature/love_me_tender
feature/teddybear
feature/return_to_sender
feature/in_the_ghetto

rebase --branches=./Sites/greatest_hits

Loading branches file...
Successfully loaded 4 branches:
01. feature/love_me_tender
02. feature/teddybear
03. feature/return_to_sender
04. feature/in_the_ghetto

Checking

Each loaded branch is validated for existence (via rev-parse), in case it does not an error is raised:

rebase --repo=./Sites/greatest_hits --branches=noent

Loading branches file...
Branch 'noent' does not exist!

Master branch

Master branch cannot be included into the branches list for obvious reasons (from useless to dangerous ones). An error is raised in case master branch is specified:

rebase --repo=./Sites/greatest_hits --branches=master

Loading branches file...
Commands cannot interact directly with 'master' branch!

Commands

Here are the available GIT commands:

Rebase

This is probably the most useful command in case you have several branches to rebase with origin/master frequently. A confirmation is asked to before rebasing.

rebase --repo=./Sites/greatest_hits --branches=feature/love_me_tender,feature/teddybear,feature/return_to_sender
...

Purge

This command remove the specified branches locally and remotely.
A confirmation is asked before removal.

purge --repo=/temp/top_20 --branches=release/in_the_ghetto
...

Aggregate

This command aggregates all of the specified branches into a single one in case you want to create a release branch.
It uses the following naming convention: release/yyyy_mm_dd
A confirmation is asked before aggregating.

aggregate --repo=./Sites/greatest_hits --branches=./Sites/greatest_hits