March 16, 2019

Git Guru

Yesterday I started a new project.

Quick background:

  1. At Mish Guru we use Github to manage our code.
  2. When a developer wants to submit a change, such as adding a feature or fixing a bug, they create a Pull Request (PR).
  3. This PR has a title, description of why the change was made and a list of all the files that were edited.
  4. Before the PR can be accepted, it must first be reviewed by at least one other member of the team.
  5. 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.

Seal

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

Git Guru

© 2020 George Czabania