SugarJar

Welcome to SugarJar - a git + github/gitlab helper. The only requirements are Ruby, git, and either gh or glab, depending on which forge you are using.

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:

[!NOTE] There is a new 'modernizeconfig' option to automatically convert your config for the significant changes in 4.x.

• Common Use-cases
  • Auto Cleanup Squash-merged branches
  • Smarter clones and remotes
  • Work with stacked branches more easily
  • Creating Stacked PRs with subfeatures
  • Smart release branch handling
  • Have a better lint/unittest experience!
  • Better push defaults
  • Cleaning up your own history
  • Better feature branches
  • Smartlog
  • Sync work across workstations
  • 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

Clean-up squash-merged PRs safely and easily

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 lbclean` - it determines if the contents of your branch has been merge and safely deletes if so. (Note: `lbclean` stands for "local branch clean", and is aliased to `bclean` for both backwards-compatibility and also since it's the most common branch-cleanup command).  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:  *NOTE*: You can add long-lived release-branches to your RepoConfig to prevent cleaning; see [Smart release branch handling](️#smart-release-branch-handling). There is also `sj rbclean` ("remote branch clean") (and `sj rbcleanall`) for cleanup of remote branches. *Note*: This cannot differentiate between PR/feature branches which have been merged and long-lived release branches that have been merged (e.g. if '2.0-release' is a branch and has no commits not in main, it will be deleted). There is even `sj gbclean` ("global branch clean") (and `sj gbcleanall`) which will do both the local and remote cleaning. *NOTE*: Remote branch cleaning is still experimental, use with caution!

Smarter clones and remotes

Fork, clone, and add the upstream remote automatically

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, and if it's not already in your personal org) * Clone your fork * Add the original as an 'upstream' remote Note that if you pass in a full-formed URL (like `git@github.com:chef/omnibus-toolchain.git`), SugarJar will infer the host and the forge type (gitub, gitlab, etc.). However, it does accept short names for repos ($org/$repo) - however, for cloning, since there is no repo yet for SugarJar to determine the forge from, you will need either to specify `--default-forge-host`, or have `default_forge_host` set in your config file. 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. If you don't work with fork-based workflows, you can set `use_forks: false` in your config for the right host: ```yaml host_configs: default: use_forks: false ``` See [Configuration](#Configuration) for more details on the config file.

Work with stacked branches more easily

Create and manage stacked/dependent branches 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

Automatically base PRs for subfeatures on their parent branch

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): ```text $ 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 ... ```

Smart release branch handling

Configure and protect long-lived release branches

You can tell sugar what release branches exist, and it will intelligently handle them. So of you specify, in your repoconfig: ```yaml release_branches: ['v1-branch', 'v2-branch'] ``` Then: * `sj feature v1-backport-foo v2-branch` will automatically base this branch on `upstream/v2-branch` (or `origin/v2-branch` as appropriate) * `sj feature v2-branch` will checkout `v2-branch` with the upstream set to `upstream/v2-branch` (or `origin/v2-branch` as appropriate) * `sj lbclean`/`sj lbcleanall` (of all varieties) will never reap release branches

Have a better lint/unittest experience!

Run lint and unittests automatically before pushing

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: ```shell sj lint ``` Run all linters. ```shell sj unit ``` Run all unittests. ```shell 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

Smart defaults for `smartpush`

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

Safely amend commits and force-push with `amend`/`fpush`

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

Create feature branches with the right base and prefix

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. ```shell $ 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`. Here's an example: ```yaml host_configs: default: feature_prefix: "jsmith/" ```

Smartlog

Visualize your branch tree

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

Sync work across workstations

Keep branches in sync across multiple machines

If you work on multiple workstations, keeping your branches in-sync can be a pain. SugarJar provides `sync` to help with this. For example, if you do some work on feature `foo` on machine1 and push to `origin/foo` (intending to eventually merge to `upstream/main`), then on machine2, you pull that branch, do more work, which you also push to `origin/foo`, then on machine1, you can do `sj sync` to pull down the changes from `origin/foo`. If you have local changes, that are not already on `origin/foo`, those will be rebased on top of the changes from `origin/foo`. It's very similar to `sj up`, but instead of rebasing on top of the tracking branch, it rebases on top of the push target branch.

Pulling in suggestions from the web

Merge in GitHub/GitLab suggested changes

When someone 'suggests' a change in the GH/GL 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.

Modernize your config

Convert your old config to the new `host_configs` format

In 4.0, we significantly revamped how the configuration works, adding the new `host_configs` section, and deprecating or moving many top-level configs. In order to make this transition easier, there is now a `modernizeconfig` command to convert it for you! ```shell sj modernizeconfig ~/.config/sugarjar/config.yml ``` This will generate a new config for you, show you a diff, and offer to either update the existing file, or save it off the side for you.

And more!

There's even more than this!

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: You can use this PPA to get newer versions for all supported Ubuntu releases (as well as some older versions). Ubuntu package maintainer.

MacOS users: We recommend using Homebrew - we keep SugarJar updated 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/GitLab

Like gh and glab, SugarJar supports Enterprise versions of GitHub and GitLab. In fact, we provide extra features just for it.

By default, SugarJar will pick up the appropriate information from the repo itself, so the only real interesting part is smartclone. In most cases, SugarJar will automatically determine the proper forge-host based on the URL you pass in. However, if you use short names ("repo/org" or "company/repo/org"), then you can either pass in --default-forge-host, or, if you want to always default to a given host, you can set a top-level default_forge_host in your SugarJar config:

So, for example you might have:

default_forge_host: gh.sample.com

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/gitlab, 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 automatically, 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. 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. Further, we support some things Sapling does not. So worry not, SugarJar will continue to be maintained and developed.