Git Jaspr (Just Another Stacked Pull Request)

This is a reimplementation of git spr written in Kotlin.

Why

Because I like Gerrit, and wish GitHub were Gerrit. But since it isn't, I have to use this tool instead. For more rationale see this excellent blog post.

How

Installing

Download the appropriate standalone binary for your platform (Linux or OS X, sorry Windows users, you can run the Java version maybe?) and install it into your PATH somewhere (~/.local/bin?) and then create a configuration file in ~/.git-jaspr.properties with the following contents:

github-token=<GH PAT>

Where <GH PAT> is a GitHub Personal Access Token (classic) with the permissions read:org, read:user, repo, and user:email.

Configuration file

Note that any option for any Jaspr command can be supplied via your global config file or your repo-specific config file. For example, if you need to use ---use-cli-git-client because you're using ssh-agent on a Mac, you don't have to supply this to every command but can instead add it to your config file:

use-cli-git-client=true

Using

Some commands to try:

$ git jaspr -h 
$ git jaspr status
$ git jaspr push
$ git jaspr merge
$ git jaspr auto-merge
$ git jaspr clean

Any of the above can be invoked with --help (except just git jaspr which requires -h for reasons not worth going into).

Enjoy!

Note on GitHub branch protection rules and rulesets

GitHub branch protection rules and rulesets are both complex features, and I won't pretend to be an expert. There are many configurations that are likely valid, so ultimately what works, works. But there are some considerations to keep in mind with regard to using Jaspr:

• At a minimum you should have a workflow that triggers on pull requests (either for all branches or at least for main and for jaspr/**/*) that runs checks and reports status back to GitHub. Likely you want a branch protection rule that requires status checks to pass before merging to main at least.
• If git jaspr status does not show the "pr approved" checkmark or x, you may need to create a branch protection rule that requires pull request approvals before merging first. (I've noticed this behavior is inconsistent... sometimes this bit shows even without this requirement.)
• You want to make sure that people can force push to jspr/**/*. Jaspr's philosophy is that of Gerrit's, which is to favor a trunk based workflow where PR remediation is done via amends/edits and are force pushed (this is why Jaspr pushes revision history branches and includes diff links for them in the PR descriptions).

Note on functional tests

This repo contains functional tests that work with a real GitHub remote and actually open/modify/close PRs. To use these tests, you will need to set some configuration options in your ~/.git-jaspr.properties file:

github-test-harness.githubUri=git@github.com:some-project.git
github-test-harness.userKey.michael.name=Michael Sims
github-test-harness.userKey.michael.email=michael@example.com
github-test-harness.userKey.michael.githubToken=<redacted>
github-test-harness.userKey.derelictMan.name=Frank Grimes
github-test-harness.userKey.derelictMan.email=frank@example.com
github-test-harness.userKey.derelictMan.githubToken=<redacted>

Replace the <redacted> with GitHub classic PATs with the same permissions required by Jaspr. The githubUri should be the URI of a test project that the tests can push to and open PRs to, etc. The repo should have a workflow triggered on PRs that runs a fake verify script:

Workflow:

name: Pull Request

on:
  pull_request:
  workflow_dispatch:

jobs:

  build:
    name: Build
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
        name: Checkout repo
        with:
          fetch-depth: 0
      - run: git checkout origin/${{ github.event.pull_request.head.ref }}

      - name: Verify
        run: |
          chmod a+x verify.sh
          ./verify.sh

verify.sh:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

set -x
set -e

# Keeping around this commented code in case github decides to start being a pain again
#git log --graph --all
# shellcheck disable=SC2034
#gitOutput=$(git show --pretty=full)

verifyDelay=$(git show --pretty=full | awk '/^    verify-delay:/ { print $2 }')
verifyResult=$(git show --pretty=full | awk '/^    verify-result:/ { print $2 }')

if [[ "$verifyDelay" -gt 0 ]]; then
  echo "Delaying $verifyDelay seconds"
  sleep "$verifyDelay"
fi

if [[ "$verifyResult" ]]; then
  echo "Exiting with code $verifyResult"
  exit "$verifyResult"
else
    echo "Verify result not found in commit body, exiting success by default"
    exit 0
fi

If you try to run these and have questions, please contact me or open an issue and I'll try to help.