Zulip-specific tools
This article documents several useful tools that can save you a lot of time when working with Git on the Zulip project.
Set up Git repo script
Extremely useful. In the tools
directory of
zulip/zulip you’ll find a bash script
setup-git-repo
. This script installs a pre-commit hook, which will
run each time you git commit
to automatically run
Zulip’s linter suite on just the files that
the commit modifies (which is really fast!). The hook passes no matter
the result of the linter, but you should still pay attention to any
notices or warnings it displays.
It’s simple to use. Make sure you’re in the clone of zulip and run the following:
$ ./tools/setup-git-repo
The script doesn’t produce any output if successful. To check that the hook has
been installed, print a directory listing for .git/hooks
and you should see
something similar to:
$ ls -l .git/hooks
pre-commit -> ../../tools/pre-commit
Configure continuous integration for your Zulip fork
You might also wish to configure continuous integration for your fork.
Reset to pull request
tools/reset-to-pull-request
is a short-cut for checking out a pull request
locally. It works slightly differently from the method
described above in that it does not create a branch for the pull request
checkout.
This tool checks for uncommitted changes, but it will move the
current branch using git reset --hard
. Use with caution.
First, make sure you are working in a branch you want to move (in this
example, we’ll use the local main
branch). Then run the script
with the ID number of the pull request as the first argument.
$ git checkout main
Switched to branch 'main'
Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/main'.
$ ./tools/reset-to-pull-request 1900
+ request_id=1900
+ git fetch upstream pull/1900/head
remote: Counting objects: 159, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (17/17), done.
remote: Total 159 (delta 94), reused 91 (delta 91), pack-reused 51
Receiving objects: 100% (159/159), 55.57 KiB | 0 bytes/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (113/113), completed with 54 local objects.
From https://github.com/zulip/zulip
* branch refs/pull/1900/head -> FETCH_HEAD
+ git reset --hard FETCH_HEAD
HEAD is now at 2bcd1d8 troubleshooting tip about provisioning
Fetch a pull request and rebase
tools/fetch-rebase-pull-request
is a short-cut for checking out a pull
request locally in its own branch and then updating it with any
changes from upstream/main
with git rebase
.
Run the script with the ID number of the pull request as the first argument.
$ tools/fetch-rebase-pull-request 1913
+ request_id=1913
+ git fetch upstream pull/1913/head
remote: Counting objects: 4, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (4/4), done.
remote: Total 4 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0
Unpacking objects: 100% (4/4), done.
From https://github.com/zulip/zulip
* branch refs/pull/1913/head -> FETCH_HEAD
+ git checkout upstream/main -b review-1913
Branch review-1913 set up to track remote branch main from upstream.
Switched to a new branch 'review-1913'
+ git reset --hard FETCH_HEAD
HEAD is now at 99aa2bf Add provision.py fails issue in common errors
+ git pull --rebase
Current branch review-1913 is up to date.
Fetch a pull request without rebasing
tools/fetch-pull-request
is a similar to tools/fetch-rebase-pull-request
, but
it does not rebase the pull request against upstream/main
, thereby getting
exactly the same repository state as the commit author had.
Run the script with the ID number of the pull request as the first argument.
$ tools/fetch-pull-request 5156
+ git diff-index --quiet HEAD
+ request_id=5156
+ remote=upstream
+ git fetch upstream pull/5156/head
From https://github.com/zulip/zulip
* branch refs/pull/5156/head -> FETCH_HEAD
+ git checkout -B review-original-5156
Switched to a new branch 'review-original-5156'
+ git reset --hard FETCH_HEAD
HEAD is now at 5a1e982 tools: Update clean-branches to clean review branches.
Push to a pull request
tools/push-to-pull-request
is primarily useful for maintainers who
are merging other users’ commits into a Zulip repository. After doing
reset-to-pull-request
or fetch-pull-request
and making some
changes, you can push a branch back to a pull request with, for example,
tools/push-to-pull-request 1234
. This is useful for a few things:
Getting CI to run and enabling you to use the GitHub “Merge” buttons to merge a PR after you make some corrections to a PR, without waiting for an extra round trip with the PR author.
For commits that aren’t ready to merge yet, communicating clearly any changes you’d like to see happen that are easier for you to explain by just editing the code than in words.
Saving a contributor from needing to duplicate any rebase work that you did as part of integrating parts of the PR.
You’ll likely want to comment on the PR after doing so, to ensure that the original contributor knows to pull your changes rather than accidentally overwriting them with a force push when they make their next batch of changes.
Note that in order to do this you need permission to do such a push, which GitHub offers by default to users with write access to the repository. For multiple developers collaborating on a PR, you can achieve this by granting other users permission to write to your fork.
Delete unimportant branches
tools/clean-branches
is a shell script that removes branches that are either:
Local branches that are ancestors of
origin/main
.Branches in origin that are ancestors of
origin/main
and named like$USER-*
.Review branches created by
tools/fetch-rebase-pull-request
andtools/fetch-pull-request
.
First, make sure you are working in branch main
. Then run the script without any
arguments for default behavior. Since removing review branches can inadvertently remove any
feature branches whose names are like review-*
, it is not done by default. To
use it, run tools/clean-branches --reviews
.
$ tools/clean-branches --reviews
Deleting local branch review-original-5156 (was 5a1e982)
Merge conflict on pnpm-lock.yaml
file
If there is a merge conflict on pnpm-lock.yaml
, pnpm should be run to
regenerate the file. Important: don’t delete the pnpm-lock.yaml
file. Check out the
latest one from origin/main
so that pnpm knows the previous asset versions.
Run the following commands
git checkout origin/main -- pnpm-lock.yaml
pnpm install
git add pnpm-lock.yaml
git rebase --continue