SugarJar

Welcome to SugarJar - a git/github helper. The only requirements are Ruby, git, and gh.

SugarJar is inspired by arcanist, and its replacement at Facebook, JellyFish. Many of the features they provide for the Phabricator workflow this aims to bring to the GitHub workflow.

In particular there are a lot of helpers for using a squash-merge workflow that is poorly handled by the standard toolsets.

If you miss Mondrian or Phabricator - this is the tool for you!

If you don't, there's a ton of useful stuff for everyone!

Jump to what you're most interested in:

• Common Use-cases
  • Auto Cleanup Squash-merged branches
  • Smarter clones and remotes
  • Work with stacked branches more easily
  • Creating Stacked PRs with subfeatures
  • Have a better lint/unittest experience!
  • Better push defaults
  • Cleaning up your own history
  • Better feature branches
  • Smartlog
  • Pulling in suggestions from the web
  • And more!
• Installation
• Configuration
• Repository Configuration
  • Commit Templates
• Enterprise GitHub
• FAQ

Common Use-cases

Auto cleanup squash-merged branches

It is common for a PR to go back and forth with a variety of nits, lint fixes, typos, etc. that can muddy history. So many projects will "squash and merge" when they accept a pull request. However, that means git branch -d <branch> doesn't work. Git will tell you the branch isn't fully merged. You can, of course git branch -D <branch>, but that does no safety checks at all, it forces the deletion.

Enter sj bclean - it determines if the contents of your branch has been merge and safely deletes if so.

Will delete a branch, if it has been merged, even if it was squash-merged.

You can pass it a branch if you'd like (it defaults to the branch you're on): sj bclean <branch>.

But it gets better! You can use sj bcleanall to remove all branches that have been merged:

Smarter clones and remotes

There's a pattern to every new repo we want to contribute to. First we fork, then we clone the fork, then we add a remote of the upstream repo. It's monotonous. SugarJar does this for you:

sj accepts both smartclone and sclone for this command.

This will:

• Fork the repo to your personal org (if you don't already have a fork)
• Clone your fork
• Add the original as an 'upstream' remote

Note that it takes short names for repos. No need to specify a full URL, just a $org/$repo.

Like git clone, sj smartclone will accept an additional argument as the destination directory to clone to. It will also pass any other unknown options to git clone under the hood.

Work with stacked branches more easily

It's important to break changes into reviewable chunks, but working with stacked branches can be confusing. SugarJar provides several tools to make this easier.

First, and foremost, is feature and subfeature. Regardless of stacking, the way to create a new feature bracnh with sugarjar is with sj feature (or sj f for short):

A "feature" in SugarJar parlance just means that the branch is always created from "most main" - this is usually upstream/main, but SJ will figure out which remote is the "upstream", even if it's origin, and then will determine the primary branch (main or for older repos master). It's also smart enough to fetch that remote first to make sure you're working on the latest HEAD.

When you want to create a stacked PR, you can create subfeature, which, at its core is just a branch created from the current branch:

If you create branches like this then sugarjar can now make several things much easier:

• sj up will rebase intelligently
• After an sj bclean of a branch earlier in the tree, sj up will update the tracked branch to "most main"

There are two commands that will show you the state of your stacked branches:

• sj binfo - shows the current branch and its ancestors up to your primary branch
• sj smartlog (aka sj sl) - shows you the whole tree.

To continue with the example above, my smartlog might look like:

As you can see, mynewthing is derived from main, and dependentnewthing is derived from mynewthing.

Now lets make a different feature stack:

The smartlog will now show us this tree, and it's a bit more interesting:

Here we can see from main, we have two branches: one going to mynewthing and one going to anotherfeature. Each of those has their own dependent branch on top.

Now, what happens if I make a change to mynewthing (the bottom of the first stack)?

We can see here now that dependentnewthing, is based off a commit that used to be mynewthing (5086ee), but mynewthing has moved. Both mynewthing and dependentnewthing are derived from 5086ee (the old mynewthing), but dependentnewthing isn't (yet) based on the current mynewthing. But SugarJar will handle this all correctly when we ask it to update the branch:

Here we see that SugarJar knew that dependentnewthing should be rebased onto mynewthing, and it did the right thing - from main there's still the 50806ee and the new additional change which are now both part of the mynewthing branch, and dependentnewthing is based on that branch, this including all 3 commits in the right order.

Now, lets say that mynewthing gets merged and we use bclean to clean it all up, what happens then?

SugarJar detects that branch is gone and thus this branch should now be based on the upstream main branch!

Creating Stacked PRs with subfeatures

When dependent branches are created with subfeature, when you create a PR, SugarJar will automatically set the 'base' of the PR to the parent branch. By default it'll prompt you about this, but you can set pr_autostack to true in your config to tell it to always do this (or false to never do this):

$ sj spr
Autofilling in PR from commit message
It looks like this is a subfeature, would you like to base this PR on mynewthing? [y/n] y
...

Have a better lint/unittest experience!

Ever made a PR, only to find out later that it failed tests because of some small lint issue? Not anymore! SJ can be configured to run things before pushing. For example,in the SugarJar repo, we have it run Rubocop (ruby lint) and Markdownlint on_push. If those fail, it lets you know and doesn't push.

You can configure SugarJar to tell it how to run both lints and unittests for a given repo and if one or both should be run prior to pushing.

The details on the config file format is below, but we provide three commands:

sj lint

Run all linters.

sj unit

Run all unittests.

sj smartpush # or spush

Run configured push-time actions (nothing, lint, unit, both), and do not push if any of them fail.

Better push defaults

In addition to running pre-push tests for you smartpush also picks smart defaults for push. So if you sj spush with no arguments, it uses the origin remote and the same branch name you're on as the remote branch.

Cleaning up your own history

Perhaps you contribute to a project that prefers to use merge commits, so you like to clean up your own history. This is often difficult to get right - a combination of rebases, amends and force pushes. We provide two commands here to help.

The first is pretty straight forward and is basically just an alias: sj amend. It will amend whatever you want to the most recent commit (just an alias for git commit --amend). It has a partner qamend (or amendq if you prefer) that will do so without prompting to update your commit message.

So now you've rebased or amended, pushing becomes challenging. You can git push --force, but everyone knows that's incredibly dangerous. Is there a better way? There is! Git provides git push --force-with-lease - it checks to make sure you're up-to-date with the remote before forcing the push. But man that command is a mouthful! Enter sj fpush. It has all the smarts of sj smartpush (runs configured pre-push actions), but adds --force-with-lease to the command!

Better feature branches

When you want to start a new feature, you want to start developing against latest. That's why sj feature defaults to creating a branch against what we call "most master". That is, upstream/master if it exists, otherwise origin/master if that exists, otherwise master. You can pass in an additional argument to base it off of something else.

$ git branch
  master
  test1
  test2
* test2.1
  test3
$ sj feature test-branch
Created feature branch test-branch based on origin/master
$ sj feature dependent-feature test-branch
Created feature branch dependent-feature based on test-branch

Additionally you can specify a feature_prefix in your config which will cause feature to create branches prefixed with your feature_prefix and will also cause co to checkout branches with that prefix. This is useful when organizations use branch-based workflows and branches need to be prefixed with e.g. $USER/.

For example, if your prefix was user/, then sj feature foo would create user/foo, and sj co foo would switch to user/foo.

Smartlog

Smartlog will show you a tree diagram of your branches! Simply run sj smartlog or sj sl for short.

Pulling in suggestions from the web

When someone 'suggests' a change in the GitHub WebUI, once you choose to commit them, your origin and local branches are no longer in-sync. The pullsuggestions command will attempt to merge in any remote commits to your local branch. This command will show a diff and ask for confirmation before attempting the merge and - if allowed to continue - will use a fast-forward merge.

And more!

See sj help for more commands!

Installation

Sugarjar is packaged in a variety of Linux distributions - see if it's on the list here, and if so, use your package manager (or gem) to install it:

If you are using a Linux distribution version that is end-of-life'd, click the above image, it'll take you to a page that lists unsupported distro versions as well (they'll have older SugarJar, but they'll probably still have some version).

Ubuntu users, Ubuntu versions prior to 24.x cannot be updated, so if you're on an older Ubuntu please use this PPA from our Ubuntu package maintainer.

For MacOS users, we recommend using Homebrew - SugarJar is now in Homebrew Core.

Finally, if none of those work for you, you can clone this repo and run it directly from there.

Configuration

Sugarjar will read in both a system-level config file (/etc/sugarjar/config.yaml) and a user-level config file ~/.config/sugarjar/config.yaml, if they exist. Anything in the user config will override the system config, and command-line options override both. The yaml file is a straight key-value pair of options without their '--'.

See examples/sample_config.yaml for an example configuration file.

In addition, the environment variable SUGARJAR_LOGLEVEL can be defined to set a log level. This is primarily used as a way to turn debug on earlier in order to troubleshoot configuration parsing.

Deprecated fields will cause a warning, but you can suppress that warning by defining ignore_deprecated_options, for example:

old_option: foo
ignore_deprecated_options:
  - old_options

Repository Configuration

Sugarjar looks for a .sugarjar.yaml in the root of the repository to tell it how to handle repo-specific things. See examples/sample_repoconfig.yaml for an example configuration that walks through all valid repo configurations in detail.

Commit Templates

While GitHub provides a way to specify a pull-request template by putting the right file into a repo, there is no way to tell git to automatically pick up a commit template by dropping a file in the repo. Users must do something like: git config commit.template <file>. Making each developer do this is error prone, so this setting will automatically set this up for each developer.

Enterprise GitHub

Like gh, SugarJar supports GitHub Enterprise. In fact, we provide extra features just for it.

You can set github_host in your global or user config, but since most users will also have a few opensource repos, you can override it in the Repository Config as well.

So, for example you might have:

github_host: gh.sample.com

In your ~/.config/sugarjar/config.yaml, but if the .sugarjar.yaml in your repo has:

github_host: github.com

Then we will configure gh to talk to github.com when in that repo.

FAQ

Why the name SugarJar?

It's mostly a backronym. Like jellyfish, I wanted two letters that were on home row on different sides of the keyboard to make it easy to type. I looked at the possible options that where there and not taken and tried to find one I could make an appropriate name out of. Since this utility adds lots of sugar to git and github, it seemed appropriate.

I'd like to package SugarJar for my favorite distro/OS, is that OK?

Of course! But I'd appreciate you emailing me to give me a heads up. Doing so will allow me to make sure it shows up in the Repology badge above.

What platforms does it work on?

Since it's Ruby, it should work across all platforms, however, it's developed and primarily tested on Linux as well as regularly used on Mac. I've not tested it on Windows, but I'll happily accept patches for Windows compatibility.

How do I get tab-completion?

If the package for your OS/distro didn't set it up manually, you should find that sugarjar_completion.bash is included in the package, and you can simply source that in your dotfiles, assuming you are using bash.

What happens now that Sapling is released?

SugarJar isn't going anywhere anytime soon. This was meant to replace arc/jf, which has now been open-sourced as Sapling, so I highly recommend taking a look at that!

Sapling is a great tool and solves a variety of problems SugarJar will never be able to. However, it is a significant workflow change, that won't be appropriate for all users or use-cases. Similarly there are workflows and tools that Sapling breaks. So worry not, SugarJar will continue to be maintained and developed.