Automate It - Be Lazy - Part I

So based on my passion as open source developer in particular for the Apache Maven Project. I work JIRA based which helps us and myself to organize our work and of course follow the reported issues, feature request etc.

So usually I start my work based on a particular issue in JIRA and go via the following process:

The process

1. Create an issue for myself (if already existing move to step 2)
2. Create a branch within the appropriate project based on the issue
3. Assign the issue to myself
4. Migrate the issue into the state of IN PROGRESS
5. Do some work on the branch and commit
6. Push the branch to remote and let Jenkins check the branch repeat with Step 5 until I finished my work.
7. Rebase against master if needed
8. Merge the created branch into master and delete the remote and local branch.
9. Close the appropriate jira issue with a reference to the commit in comment.

Let us take a look at a real life example. The exemplary issue is MCLEAN-87 which has been worked on and commited with an appropriate commit message which should look like the following:

[JIRA-ISSUE] - Summary Text
Optional description

So the real life commit looks like this:

commit c6eed44352c9ab623836a9329b7645dbb61413bc (HEAD -> master, origin/master, m/master)
Author: Karl Heinz Marbaise <khmarbaise@apache.org>
Date:   Sat Jul 21 18:00:20 2018 +0200

    [MCLEAN-87] - Upgrade maven-plugins parent to version 32

If you take a look at the list of process steps, it is a huge number of steps. Unfortunately many of the steps are manual steps which is time consuming and error-prone.

So about four or five months ago I started to automate/simplifying some steps of the above process.

Automation Step 1

In process step 6 while I was working on a branch I have to push the current state of the branch over and over again to remote and let Jenkins check if everything is going fine. Furthermore it could be that I need to rebase this branch against master which has to be followed by a git push --force BRANCH but a --force is very dangerous which means I have to use git push --force-with-lease BRANCH instead. I already have a bash completion for git running which safes a lot of typing but I would like to make it more comfortable.

So I started to write a bash script which comprises of the following steps:

1. Check if we are on a branch just to be sure.
2. Get the branch name
3. git push origin --force-with-lease BRANCH

So this means in the end I simply call the script:

$ gitpushwithlease.sh

The first step of automation accomplished which means a little bit improvement but not enough.

Automation Step 2

So after a time working with that I thought about process step 8 wich is really much typing and error-prone. Let me summarize the steps:

1. check if we are on a branch
2. get the branch name
3. checkout master
4. merge the branch only if a fast forward is possible fail otherwise
5. push changes to remote master
6. delete the remote branch
7. delete the local branch

The result was my gitmergeandclean.sh script which I use like the following:

$ gitmergeandclean.sh

The output looks like this:

~/ws-git-maven/plugins/maven-clean-plugin (MCLEAN-87)$ gitmergeandclean.sh
Switched to branch 'master'
Your branch is up to date with 'origin/master'.
Updating 19b981e..c6eed44
Fast-forward
 pom.xml | 3 +--
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 2 deletions(-)
Total 0 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)
remote: Sending notification emails to: ['"commits@maven.apache.org" <commits@maven.apache.org>']
remote: To git@github:apache/maven-clean-plugin.git
remote:    19b981e..c6eed44  c6eed44352c9ab623836a9329b7645dbb61413bc -> master
remote: Syncing refs/heads/master...
To https://gitbox.apache.org/repos/asf/maven-clean-plugin.git
   19b981e..c6eed44  master -> master
remote: Sending notification emails to: ['"commits@maven.apache.org" <commits@maven.apache.org>']
remote: To git@github:apache/maven-clean-plugin.git
remote:  - [deleted]         MCLEAN-87
remote: Syncing refs/heads/MCLEAN-87 (FORCED)...
To https://gitbox.apache.org/repos/asf/maven-clean-plugin.git
 - [deleted]         MCLEAN-87
Deleted branch MCLEAN-87 (was c6eed44). 

The second step of automation accomplished which means more improvement but not enough.

Automation Step 3

If I work on a branch I often do several commits on it until I think I am done. The result is a branch which contains 5, 6 or more commits which should be squashed into a single commit with a good commit message and a reference to the issue I am working on.

This can be done manually and interactive via the following steps:

1. Count the number of commits you would like to squash
2. git rebase -i HEAD~NUMBEROFCOMMIT
3. Going through the editor and replace pick with s for squash.
4. Safe and rewrite the commit message.

(I assume I have missed something).
So this was really cumbersome. So I decided to find a scripted way to handle that.
After some experiments I found a solution which results in my gitrebasebranch.sh script

$ gitrebasebranch.sh

and in the editor I only rework the commit message. That's it. After this I can do:

$ gitpushwithlease.sh

The third step of automation accomplished which means more improvement but not enough.

The story will be continued in my next post.