March 16, 2019
Git Guru
Yesterday I started a new project.
Quick background:
- At Mish Guru we use Github to manage our code.
- When a developer wants to submit a change, such as adding a feature or fixing a bug, they create a Pull Request (PR).
- This PR has a title, description of why the change was made and a list of all the files that were edited.
- Before the PR can be accepted, it must first be reviewed by at least one other member of the team.
- Each day several PRs will be created, some are small changes and don’t take very long to review, others can be quite large and may require a bit of back-and-forth before they are accepted.
Cool. So, we have all these PRs, and we need a way to keep track of them all. We currently use Seal - which does a pretty good job of posting a list of all open PRs on Slack.
However, it could be better.
- All PRs are listed in a single slack post. This makes it difficult to comment on a particular PR. We also can’t check off each PR as we review it.
- We use Clubhouse at Mish to keep track of what we are working on, and each PR should be linked to a Clubhouse card. It would be useful if we could get that link displayed in Slack, and also highlight which PRs haven’t been linked.
- The person who opened the PR is displayed, but Seal shows their github username. At Mish we usually refer to each by our real names. E.g. I would like “George Czabania” displayed instead of “stayradiated”.
- Support for custom validation checks. We want to encourage team members to write a description for their PR, but it can be easy to forget. If a PR is missing a description, then it should encourage them to write one.
So I started a new project called “Git Guru”. It uses the Github REST API to fetch all the open pull requests, and formats the data as a pretty nice looking Slack attachment.
It’s all open source and you can find the repo at https://github.com/mishguruorg/gitguru