git-machete

💪 git-machete is a robust tool that simplifies your git workflows.

🦅 The bird's eye view provided by git-machete makes merges/rebases/push/pulls hassle-free even when multiple branches are present in the repository (master/develop, your topic branches, teammate's branches checked out for review, etc.).

🎯 Using this tool, you can maintain small, focused, easy-to-review pull requests with little effort.

👁 A look at a git machete status gives an instant answer to the questions:

• What branches are in this repository?
• What is going to be merged (rebased/pushed/pulled) and to what?

🚜 git machete traverse semi-automatically traverses the branches, helping you effortlessly rebase, merge, push and pull.

🔌 See also VirtusLab/git-machete-intellij-plugin — a port into a plugin for the IntelliJ Platform products, including PyCharm, WebStorm etc.

Install

We suggest a couple of alternative ways of installation.

Bash and zsh completion scripts are provided in completion/ directory, see wiki for their installation instructions.

git-machete requires Python >= 3.6. Python 2.x is no longer supported.

Using Homebrew (macOS)

brew tap VirtusLab/git-machete
brew install git-machete

Using Snappy (most Linux distributions)

Tip: check the guide on installing snapd if you don't have Snap support set up yet in your system.

sudo snap install --classic git-machete

It can also be installed via Ubuntu Software (simply search for git-machete).

Note: classic confinement is necessary to ensure access to the editor installed in the system (to edit e.g. .git/machete file or rebase TODO list).

Using PPA (Ubuntu)

Tip: run sudo apt-get install -y software-properties-common first if add-apt-repository is not available on your system.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:virtuslab/git-machete
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y python3-git-machete

Using rpm (Fedora/RHEL/CentOS/openSUSE...)

Download the rpm package from the latest release and install either by opening it in your desktop environment or with rpm -i git-machete-*.noarch.rpm.

Using AUR (Arch Linux)

Install the AUR package git-machete using an AUR helper of your preference.

Using Nix (macOS & most Linux distributions)

On macOS and most Linux distributions, you can install via Nix:

nix-channel --add https://nixos.org/channels/nixos-unstable unstable  # if you haven't set up any channels yet
nix-env -i git-machete

Using pip with sudo (system-wide install)

You need to have Python and pip installed from system packages.

sudo -H pip install git-machete

Tip: pass an extra -U flag to pip install to upgrade an already installed version.

Using pip without sudo (user-wide install)

You need to have Python and pip installed from system packages.

pip install --user git-machete

Please verify that your PATH variable has ${HOME}/.local/bin/ included.

Tip: pass an extra -U flag to pip install to upgrade an already installed version.

Quick start

Discover the branch layout

cd your-repo/
git machete discover

See and possibly edit the suggested layout of branches. Branch layout is always kept as a .git/machete text file.

See the current repository state

git machete status --list-commits

Green edge means the given branch is in sync with its parent.
Red edge means it is out of sync — parent has some commits that the given branch does not have.
Gray edge means that the branch is merged to its parent.

Rebase, reset to remote, push, pull all branches as needed

git machete traverse --fetch --start-from=first-root

Put each branch one by one in sync with its parent and remote tracking branch.

Fast-forward current branch to match a child branch

git machete advance

Useful for merging the child branch to the current branch in a linear fashion (without creating a merge commit).

GitHub integration

git machete anno --sync-github-prs

This will automatically annotate the branches with GitHub PR numbers.

Note: for private repositories, a GitHub API token with repo access is required. This will be resolved from the first of:

1. The GITHUB_TOKEN env var.
2. The auth token from the current gh configuration.
3. The auth token from the current hub configuration.

Reference

See git machete help and git machete help <command> for reference.

Take a look at reference blog post for a guide on how to use the tool.

The more advanced features like automated traversal, upstream inference and tree discovery are described in the second part of the series.

Git compatibility

git-machete (since version 2.13.0) is compatible with git >= 1.8.0.

Contributions

Contributions are welcome! See contributing guidelines for details. Help would be especially appreciated with Python code style and refactoring — so far more focus has been put on features, documentation and automating the distribution.