Working on a Repo
My engineering department is decently sized, about 50-60 engineers all pushing to (typically) the same repository. Changes happen all the time that force us to merge an updated master into a working branch. This is due to a number of different reasons. One being our heavy reliance on tests from a number of different frameworks, across a broad codebase.
Recently, I found myself constantly running git fetch
and git merge origin/master
. This redundancy irked me. I, like most sane developers, love the terminal and the command line. So I thought back to my school days were we played around with bash and making our own custom commands. So I decided to make things a little easier.
Automation
Note: I work on MacOS
This'll be quick! In my ~/.bash_profile
I put the following code snippet:
# Load custom bash functions
if [ -r ~/.custom_cmds.sh ]; then
source ~/.custom_cmds.sh
fi
This simply looks for the ~/.custom_cmds.sh
file, and loads it into every new bash session (by default from ~/.bash_profile
).
Create the custom commands file and inside of it, simply put:
merge_master() {
git fetch;
git merge origin/master;
}
This creates a bash function called merge_master
. Of course, you can name it anything you want, but I went with this.
Afterwards, I ran chmod u+x ~/.custom_cmds.sh
to ensure execution rights of the file. Now just restart the terminal, or run source ~/.bash_profile
and Boom. You have your first custom command line function! While simple, it makes me a little happier - run it from any of your repositories with a simple merge_master
.
With this bash syntax, we can now create any automated function we want that will simplify our command-line-lives. Just add it into your ~/.custom_cmds.sh
file!
What else do you like to automate? Bash is incredibly powerful - the options are limitless!
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