Background
I'm working with a large team using git for version control. The normal flow is:
People selecting a ticket from the "backlog queue".
Working on the issue via a local branch (i.e. git checkout -b my_feature_branch).
Making several commits as they go (i.e. git commit).
Pushing local changes to a remote branch in order to "backup" their work so it lives on more than one machine, in case the laptop is damaged or stolen (i.e. git push -u origin my_feature_branch).
Eventually creating a code review on our private github page, and doing a squashed merge from the feature branch to master.
In addition to the remote feature branches created by employees on an as-needed basis, we have several dozen release branches that are used to create the "gold builds" we ship to customers, i.e. 1.00, 1.01, 2.00, 2.01, 2.02, etc.
Problem
Some developers have begun to complain that there are too many branches, and I tend to agree. Some developers haven't been diligent about cleaning up old branches when they are no longer needed (even though github provides a one-button delete feature for this once the code review is complete).
Question
Is there a way to configure our company github deployment so that, when people use git branch via the CLI:
Only our "important/release/gold" branches appear.
The one-off developer (temporary) branches only appear via git branch -a?
The main goal of this is to reduce clutter.
Edit: I found a similar question, but the only answer is not at all applicable (don't use remote branches), which violates my key constraint of allowing people to push to remote branches as a form of data backup. The concept of private namespaces, as hinted by #Mort, seems to be exactly what I'm looking for. Now, how do I accomplish that?
Long story short: you can - but it may be a bit tricky.
You should use the namespace concept (give a look here: gitnamespaces)
Quoting from the docs:
Git supports dividing the refs of a single repository into multiple namespaces, each of which has its own branches, tags, and HEAD. Git can expose each namespace as an independent repository to pull from and push to, while sharing the object store
and
Storing multiple repositories as namespaces of a single repository avoids storing duplicate copies of the same objects, such as when storing multiple branches of the same source.
To activate a namespace you can simply:
export GIT_NAMESPACE=foo
or
git --namespace=foo clone/pull/push
When a namespace is active, through git remote show origin you can see only the remote branches created in the current namespace. If you deactivate it (unset GIT_NAMESPACE), you will see again the main remote branches.
A possible workflow in your situation may be:
Create a feature branch and work on it
export GIT_NAMESPACE=foo
git checkout -b feature_branch
# ... do the work ...
git commit -a -m "Fixed my ticket from backlog"
git push origin feature_branch # (will push into the namespace and create the branch there)
Merging upstream
unset GIT_NAMESPACE
git checkout master
git pull (just to have the latest version)
git merge --squash --allow-unrelated-histories feature_branch
git commit -a -m "Merged feature from backlog"
git push # (will push into the main refs)
The tricky part
Namespace provides a complete isolation of branches, but you need to activate and to deactivate namespace each time
Pay attention
Pay attention when pushing. Git will push in the current namespace. If you are working in the feature branch and you forgot to activate the namespace, when pushing, you will create the feature branch in the main refs.
It seems as if the simplest solution here, since you're using GitHub and a pull-request workflow, is that developers should be pushing to their own fork of the repository rather than to a shared repository. This way their remote feature branches aren't visible to anybody else, so any "clutter" they see will be entirely their own responsibility.
If everything lives in a single repository, another option would be to set up a simple web service that receives notifications from github when you close a pull request (responding to the PullRequest event). You could then have the service delete the source branch corresponding to the pull request.
This is substantially less simple than the previous solution, because it involves (a) writing code and (b) running a persistent service that is (c) accessible to github webooks and that (d) has appropriate permissions on the remote repository.
The first answers are good. If you can fork repositories and use pull-requests or just keep the branches for yourself, do it.
I will however put my 2 cents in case you are in my situation : a lot of WIP branches that you have to push to a single repository since you work on multiple workstations, don't have fork possibilities, and don't want to annoy your fellow developers.
Make branches starting with a specific prefix, i.e. wip/myuser/, fetch from / push to a custom refspec, i.e. refs/x-wip/myuser/*.
Here is a standard remote configuration after a clone:
[remote "origin"]
url = file:///c/temp/remote.git
fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
To push branches starting with wip/myuser/ to refs/x-wip/myuser/, you will add:
push = refs/heads/wip/myuser/*:refs/x-wip/myuser/*
This will however override the default push rule for the normal branches. To restore it, you will add:
push = refs/heads/*:refs/heads/*
Finally, to fetch you WIP branches that are now outside the conventional refs/heads/* refspec, you will add:
fetch = +refs/x-wip/myuser/*:refs/remotes/origin/wip/myuser/*
You will end up with this 2nd remote configuration:
[remote "origin"]
url = file:///c/temp/remote.git
fetch = +refs/x-wip/myuser/*:refs/remotes/origin/wip/myuser/*
fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
push = refs/heads/wip/myuser/*:refs/x-wip/myuser/*
push = refs/heads/*:refs/heads/*
(Git evaluates fetch / push rules from the top to the bottom, and stops as soon as one matches; this means you want to order your rules from the most to the less specific rule.)
People using the standard remote configuration will only fetch branches from refs/heads/*, while you will fetch branches from both refs/heads/* and refs/x-wip/myuser/* with the 2nd configuration.
When your branch is ready to be "public", remove the wip/myuser/ prefix.
The refspec internal documentation was useful to make it.
Please note that once you have push rules in your remote configuration, running the command...
git push
... with no arguments will no longer only push your current branch, nor use any strategy defined with the push.default configuration. It will push everything according to your remote push rules.
You will either need to always specify the remote and the branch you want to push, or use an alias as suggested in this answer.
Related
We are using Git for a website project where the develop branch will be the source of the test server, and the master branch will serve as the source for the live, production site. The reason being to keep the git-related steps (switching branches, pushing and pulling) to a minimum for the intended user population. It should be possible for these (not extremely technical) users to run a script that will merge develop into master, after being alerted that this would be pushed to live. master cannot be modified by normal users, only one special user can do the merge.
This is where I'm not sure how to integrate this identity change into my code below:
https://gist.github.com/jfix/9fb7d9e2510d112e83ee49af0fb9e27f
I'm using the simple-git npm library. But more generally, I'm not sure whether what I want to do is actually possible as I can't seem to find information about this anywhere.
My intention would be of course to use a Github personal token instead of a password.
Git itself doesn't do anything about user or permission management. So, the short answer is, don't try to do anything sneaky. Rather, use Github's user accounts they way they were intended.
What I suggest is to give this special user their own Github account, with their own copy of the repo. Let's say the main repo is at https://github.com/yourteam/repo, and the special repo is at https://github.com/special/repo.
The script will pull changes from the team repo's develop branch, and merge this into it's own master branch and push to https://github.com/special/repo.
Then, it will push its changes to the team's master branch. This step can optionally be a forced push, since no one else is supposed to mess with master, anyway. (In case someone does, using a forced push here means they have to fix their local repo to match the team repo later on, rather than having the script fail until someone fixes the team repo.)
At the same time, your CI software will notice that master has changed at https://github.com/special/repo, and will publish as you normally would. This is the linchpin: the CI doesn't pay attention to the team repo, so although your team has permission to change it, those changes don't make it into production.
This special user will need commit access to the team repo, in addition to its own GitHub repo. The easiest way is probably to use an SSH key, and run the git push command from the script, rather than trying to use the GitHub API.
In our office we are using Stash without server access (maximum access level is create branch) so we need to restrict a particular Git branch from the pushes. So simply, what we need to do is we need to freeze our branch after the release.
Currently what we are doing is we replicate the feature branch and remove that branch from the remote, but that is bit risky.
Are there any other possible solutions?
You should be able to associate to that branch a permission which suits your need.
See "Stash: Using branch permissions".
By limiting write access to a specific owner, for instance, you remove push for all other contributors.
Technically, you could set up a hook that forbids pushing to a certain branch. This is discussed in Is there a way to lock a branch in GIT.
However, your statement
what we need to do is we need to freeze our branch after the release
makes me think that you actually want to use git tag instead of making a branch read-only.
Our team members are not all familiar with git, some members may take a mistake to force push the local branch on to server especially if they are using Windows GUI tools.
I'm wondering if there is any way to control the force push permission for different roles. I googled, but found no answer. I'm using latest Gitlab.
Not yet (should be in GitLab 6.8+): there is a pull request in progress: "pull 6190", which stemmed from this suggestion.
GitLab already has protected branches that prevent push for all except masters. However, there's still the problem of accidental history rewrites and force pushes by masters that can wipe out the whole repository (has happened in real life).
Therefore it is useful to additionally have protection against branch deletion and history rewriting.
The code changes are visible here and are based on a pull request on gitlab-shell, with a definition in lib/gitlab_update.rb:
def forced_push?
missed_refs = IO.popen(%W(git rev-list #{#newrev}..#{#oldrev} --)).read
missed_refs.split("\n").size > 0
end
I have a bare git repository that I use to push to and pull from on a linux machine (let's call the bare git repository remote originlinux). From my working repository that has originlinux as a remote I push and pull until finally I decide to put it on github. I add the repository for github on their web gui and add the remote repository on my working repository (let's call the remote origingithub) using the git remote add command followed by git pull --rebase, then git push (pull before push since I wasn't allowed to simply push to a newly created github repository without getting one of these: 'hint: Updates were rejected because the tip of your current branch is behind'. I figure this has something to do with their option to create a readme file). And here's the issue, after performing these steps, the originlinux repository is completely not synced with the origingithub repository even though they have exactly the same commits and were pushed to from the same exact working repository. Could someone please explain in good detail why this occurring and also what I could do differently to prevent this from happening without reordering how I create my remote repositories? It seems like the workflow or order of operations I'm using doesn't make sense in git land, but how else would you keep multiple remote repositories sync'd on one working copy?
Thanks!
The two repositories do not have the same commits.
When you did git pull --rebase, you rewrote the entire history of the project so that every revision contains that readme file. So every commit in the history will have a different SHA1 identifier.
There are a couple of ways that you may be able to recover from this.
First, you could revert the state of your local repository to match the state or your first (non-github) remote. This would eliminate the readme file that you created on github (you can copy that to some other location and add it back in to git later if desired), along with any changes that you hadn't pushed to the first remote (including changes that haven't been committed).
git reset --hard originlinux/master
git push -f origingithub
The -f option there causes the push to be forced even though that is removing some commits. This is something that should be avoided in general, but it is sometimes necessary such as in this case.
The other option would be to just do a force push to your first remote, accepting the new history caused by the rebase.
git push -f originlinux
If the three repositories that you mentioned are the only ones, it shouldn't matter much which of these methods you use. If there are other repositories you may want try to determine which version of the history is more widely known, and keep that version.
We are working on a project in a 3 people team. We don't have yet a separate machine to set up a Git central server so we have to get along without it. We will have the machine in a few days so I treat the curent workflow more like an experiment. So now we do like this:
1) every member is creating a git repository on his computer simply like this:
git init
2) every member makes his repository readable by others like this:
in .git directory:
touch git-daemon-export-ok
And then:
git daemon &
3) every member sends address of his repository to other members and every member imports it like this:
git remote add aa git://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/home/username/code
Now when the initial setup is done our workflow looks like this:
We checkout to the dev branch on our local repository to do the work. When we're done, we pull other members' master branches into our repository:
git pull --rebase aa master
git pull --rebase ab master
...
Finally we squash commits from our dev branch if necessary and merge them with our local master. From now on other members will be able to download these commits form our computer into their masters.
What do you think about it?
#
I should add that this is happening in the company and we are not allowed to use Github or something like this here. Our software is going to be open source but we have to follow strict security policy.
I believe if the team is self disciplined there shouldn't be any problem, but definitely treat this a a temporary solution, because if the team increase will be much harder to avoid problems. Btw maybe think about github private repository. They work like a charm.
Seems rather a convoluted solution to me. So why not just use a hosted service temporarily, and move to your own Git server when it arrives?
Obviously, GitHub is the 800-pound gorilla in the room here, but I personally use BitBucket in a professional capacity because unlike GitHub, it offers free private repositories (but limited to five users).