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Git & Git Patterns. Trunk Devel, Git Flow & Feature Flags. Merge BOTs

Git and Patterns for Managing Source Code Branches. Merge BOTs

Git Distributed Version-Control System

Design By Contract

Wikipedia: Design by contract (DbC), also known as contract programming, programming by contract and design-by-contract programming, is an approach for designing software.

It prescribes that software designers should define formal, precise and verifiable interface specifications for software components, which extend the ordinary definition of abstract data types with preconditions, postconditions and invariants. These specifications are referred to as “contracts”, in accordance with a conceptual metaphor with the conditions and obligations of business contracts.

Git Cheat Sheets

Patterns for Managing Source Code Branches (Branching Models/Workflows)

Git Workflows

Trunk Based Development

Feature Branch Development (aka GitFlow)

Git Flow

Trunk-based Development vs. Git Flow

Alternative Branching Models

Feature Flags (Feature Toggles)

Git Commands

  • Show commit logs:
git log --oneline --all --graph --decorate

git reset --hard HEAD^
git push origin -f

BitBucket

GitLab

GitHub

Git Tools

Azure DevOps (formerly known as VSTS)

Merge BOTs

Tips

  • Use bots to accomplish tasks like merging PR’s that have been approved and automatically updating dependencies. Usage of one of these bots might allow us to trigger certain builds based off of specific GitHub tags, it would allow us to only selectively run certain test suites and increase the throughput of the build by only testing changes made in a branch / PR.
  • Investigate options that are available and see if we can integrate them with CI.
  • We should be able to configure this bot to automatically apply labels to PR’s based off of what is changed in a PR. For instance, if a PR contains any documentation changes, the area/Documentation label can be applied.

Jenkins for git merges

Bitbucket for git merges

GitLab for git merges

  • Auto-merge between release branches
  • Provide merge bot functionality
  • lab.texthtml.net: Gitlab Merge Bot
  • Mergecrush A email & slack reminder bot for Gitlab merge requests.
  • stackoverflow.com: How can we programmatically approve merge requests in GitLab?
    • Our group has a bot that creates merge requests for certain mechanical changes to our code base. We’d like these MRs to get merged in automatically if/when the CI pipeline succeeds, but our projects require an approval from a member of our group. This means that right now a human has to manually click on “approve” and “merge” for each bot-created MR. Apparently GitLab doesn’t have a way to set different approval rules for some users, so I haven’t found a way to make the bot’s user immune to this requirement.
    • My current idea is to have a separate process that approves each of the merge requests created by the bot. Is there an easy way to do this programmatically? That is, is there an API (or better yet, a command line tool) that, when given the name of the branch for a merge request, approves the merge request associated with that branch?
    • I’m also open to other ways of getting these changes in with minimal human intervention. I do want them to pass the CI pipeline, though (which is currently accomplished by having them use MRs) and the MRs also help in the rare cases where the pipeline fails, so we can debug what went wrong.
Marge GitLab bot

Jenkins-X bots

  • Jenkins-X UpdateBOT A simple bot for updating dependencies in source code and automatically generating Pull Requests in downstream projects.

Plastic SCM bot

Mergify bot

GitHub bots

Bors GitHub bot