Git 'Er Done is a ruby tool for automating common git operations. It's similar in concept to git flow (https://github.com/nvie/gitflow) but is designed for small teams. It's branching model is quite a bit simpler but still makes it easy to keep an organized Git repository.

Reasons for this project

This project exists for a few reasons:

1. Encourage good habits: Practices like rebasing, feature branches and squashing commits make code repositories easy to follow.
2. Make 'Right way' easy: Doing proper git workflows require a lot of commands. We should script them to make them easy.
3. Exploration: I want to understand more how to configure git process flows (much like git-flow) does, but have more configurability (via Ruby)

Installation

gem install git_er_done

This makes the gd command available on your system. In 0.5.1, I have added some other alias commands gi and gti just to try them out for style.

What you get

1. Starting Feature Branches

When you work locally, it's helpful to work in a feature branch. To create a feature branch, you would normally do something like:

git checkout -b features/new_widget

With GitErDone, you can type the following to get the same thing:

$ gd feature new_widget

Really, the only benefit from this is prefixing branches with features/, which provides some context to your branch names. (Later, we might add bugs/ and/or 'remote-features')

2. Finishing a feature

After you are done with your feature, you might want to do a few things:

1. Squash your feature's commits into a single commit
2. Checkout master
3. Merge your changes
4. Delete the branch

That's a lot of commands to remember and type. Instead, you can do:

gd done

This will trigger an interactive rebase including all changes made since master. You can choose to squash them (or not). Then it will merge your changes with master, and delete your branch.

Pretty simple.

3. Keeping in Sync with the master using rebase

Unless you are working by yourself, its likely you may start a feature and before you can merge and push your changes, somebody is going to push changes. It's going to be a lot easier to reconcile your changes sooner than later. With GitErDone, you can do the following when working in your feature branch.

(features/new_widget)$ gd sync

This will do the following:

1. Checkout master and then pull
2. Checkout your branch
3. Rebase your branch from master. See rebasing for more info.

Syncing frequently will help avoid nasty merges later.

Syntax

Command reference:

gd - Lists all available commands.
gd help <command> - Get help for a specific command.
gd feature new_widget - Creates a new feature branch with the name 'new_widget'.
gd done new_widget  - Completes a feature branch with the name 'new_widget' (Commit, squash, merge and delete branch).
gd done - Completes the current feature branch you are on.
gd squash - Condenses multiple commits for the current branch into a single commit.
gd sync - Brings your branch up to date with the latest version (Use before finishing a feature)
gd inception - Determines the original branch(es) your current commit came from.

Goals

Here's what I want to be able to support

• Creating and closing feature branches should be simple.
• Small projects that can work from and merge to master shouldn't need a 'develop' branch. (i.e. git-flow)
• Should automatically squashing commits from feature branches into a single commit via rebase
• Support git-flow's Feature, hotfix, release branches to/from develop if necessary.
• Provide a nice discoverable CLI for doing this sort of thing.

Todo

• Improve error messages for incorrectly supplied parameters. (i.e. gd feature)
• If you gd sync with unstaged changes, it should not switch branches. (It does, which is probably wrong)
• Better error checking (merges failing may cause problems)

References

• Interactive Rebasing (i.e. Squashing Commits) - http://book.git-scm.com/4_interactive_rebasing.html
• Target workflow - http://reinh.com/blog/2009/03/02/a-git-workflow-for-agile-teams.html -
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5294069/best-way-to-create-an-executable-for-a-gem-using-rake - Minimum work to make a CLI bin file.