SugarJar

Important

As this was meant to replace arc/jf, which has now been open-sourced as Sapling, 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 bigger workflow change, so existing SJ users may choose to stick with this. Similarly some workflows may not be suitable for Sapling. I still plan to maintain and develop SugarJar for the time being.

Welcome to SugarJar - a git/github helper. It needs one of the GitHub CLI's: either gh or the older hub.

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!

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.

NOTE: If you previously used our custom Homebrew tap, you should remove and untap it:

homebrew uninstall sugarjar
homebrew untap jaymzh/sugarjar

Then you can install the core version (brew install sugarjar).

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

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.

sj bclean

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:

$ git branch
* argparse
  master
  feature
  hubhost
$ git bcleanall
Skipping branch argparse - there are unmerged commits
Reaped branch feature
Reaped branch hubhost

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 smartclone jaymzh/sugarjar

(also sj sclone)

This will:

• Make a fork of the repo, if you don't already have one
• 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 sclone 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):

$ sj feature mynewthing
Created feature branch mynewthing based on origin/main

A "feature" in SugarJar parliance 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:

$ sj subfeature dependentnewthing
Created feature branch dependentnewthing based on mynewthing

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 smartlist (aka sj sl) - shows you the whole tree.

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

$ sj sl
* 59c0522 (HEAD -> dependentnewthing) anothertest
* 6ebaa28 (mynewthing) test
o 7a0ffd0 (tag: v1.1.2, origin/main, origin/HEAD, main) Version bump (#160)

This is simple. Now lets make a different feature stack:

$ sj feature anotherfeature
Created feature branch anotherfeature based on origin/main
# do stuff
$ sj subfeature dependent2
Created feature branch dependent2 based on anotherfeature
# do stuff

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

$ sj sl
* af6f143 (HEAD -> dependent2) morestuff
* 028c7f4 (anotherfeature) stuff
| * 59c0522 (dependentnewthing) anothertest
| * 6ebaa28 (mynewthing) test
|/
o 7a0ffd0 (tag: v1.1.2, origin/main, origin/HEAD, main) Version bump (#160)

Now, what happens if I make a change to mynewthing?

$ sj co mynewthing
Switched to branch 'mynewthing'
Your branch is ahead of 'origin/main' by 1 commit.
  (use "git push" to publish your local commits)
$ echo 'randomchange' >> README.md
$ git commit -a -m change
[mynewthing d33e082] change
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)
$ sj sl
* d33e082 (HEAD -> mynewthing) change
| * af6f143 (dependent2) morestuff
| * 028c7f4 (anotherfeature) stuff
| | * 59c0522 (dependentnewthing) anothertest
| |/
|/|
* | 6ebaa28 test
|/
o 7a0ffd0 (tag: v1.1.2, origin/main, origin/HEAD, main) Version bump (#160)

We can see here now that dependentnewthing, is based off a commit that used to be mynewthing, but mynewthing has moved. But SugarJar will handle this all correctly when we ask it to update the branch:

$ sj co dependentnewthing
Switched to branch 'dependentnewthing'
Your branch and 'mynewthing' have diverged,
and have 1 and 1 different commits each, respectively.
  (use "git pull" if you want to integrate the remote branch with yours)
$ sj up
dependentnewthing rebased on mynewthing
$ sj sl
* 93ed585 (HEAD -> dependentnewthing) anothertest
* d33e082 (mynewthing) change
* 6ebaa28 test
| * af6f143 (dependent2) morestuff
| * 028c7f4 (anotherfeature) stuff
|/
o 7a0ffd0 (tag: v1.1.2, origin/main, origin/HEAD, main) Version bump (#160)

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

$ sj up
The brach we were tracking is gone, resetting tracking to origin/main
dependentnewthing rebased on origin/main

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:

git lint

Run all linters.

git unit

Run all unittests.

git 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!

Using SugarJar as a git wrapper

SugarJar, by default, will pass any command it doesn't know straight to hub (which passes commands it doesn't know to git). If you have configured SugarJar to use gh instead of hub, then it will pass commands straight to git since gh doesn't act as a git wrapper.

As such you can alias it to git and just have a super-git.

$ alias git=sj
$ git config -l | grep color
color.diff=auto
color.status=auto
color.branch=auto
color.branch.current=yellow reverse
color.branch.local=yellow
color.branch.remote=green
$ git br
* dependent-feature 44cf9e2 Lint/gemspec cleanups
  master            44cf9e2 Lint/gemspec cleanups
  test-branch       44cf9e2 Lint/gemspec cleanups
  test1             c808eae [ahead 1] test1
  test2             e545b41 test2
  test2.1           c1831b3 test2.1
  test3             e451865 test3

It's for this reason that SugarJar doesn't have conflicting command names. You can turn off fallthru by setting fallthru: false in your config.

The only command we "override" is version, in which case we not only print our version, but also call hub version which prints its version and calls git version too!

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 '--'. For example:

log_level: debug
github_user: jaymzh

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.

Repository Configuration

Sugarjar looks for a .sugarjar.yaml in the root of the repository to tell it how to handle repo-specific things. Currently there options are:

• lint - A list of scripts to run on sj lint. These should be linters like rubocop or pyflake. Linters will be run from the root of the repo.
• lint_list_cmd - A command to run which will print out linters to run, one per line. Takes precedence over lint. The command (and the resulting linters) will be run from the root of the repo.
• unit - A list of scripts to run on sj unit. These should be unittest runners like rspec or pyunit. Test will be run from the root of the repo.
• unit_list_cmd - A command to run which will print out the unit tests to run, one more line. Takes precedence over unit. The command (and the resulting unit tests) will be run from the root of the repo.
• on_push - A list of types (lint, unit) of checks to run before pushing. It is highly recommended this is only lint. The goal here is to allow for the user to get quick stylistic feedback before pushing their branch to avoid the push-fix-push-fix loop.
• commit_template - A path to a commit template to set in the commit.template git config for this repo. Should be either a fully-qualified path, or a path relative to the repo root.
• include_from - This will read an additional repoconfig file and merge it into the one being read. The value should be relative to the root of the repo. This will not error if the file does not exist, it is intended for organizations to allow users to optionally extend a default repo config.
• overwrite_from - Same as include_from, but completely overwrites the base configuration if the file is found.

Example configuration:

lint:
  - scripts/lint
unit:
  - scripts/unit
on_push:
  - lint
commit_template: .commit-template.txt

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

We recommend the global or user config specify the github_host. However, most users will also have a few repos from upstream so always specifying a github_host is sub-optimal.

So, when you overwrite the github_host on the command line, we go ahead and set the hub.host git config in that single repo so that it'll "just work" from there on out.

In other words, assuming your global SJ config has github_host: github.sample.com, and the you clone sugarjar with:

sj clone jaymzh/sugarjar --github-host githuh.com

We will add the hub.host to the sugarjar clone so that future hub or sj commands work without needing to specify..

Choosing a GitHub CLI

SugarJar will use gh if it is available or otherwise fall back to hub. You can override this by specifying --github-cli on the command line or setting github_cli to either gh or hub (it defaults to auto) in your configuration.

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.

Why did you originally use hub instead of the newer gh CLI?

When I originally wrote SugarJar, gh was in early development, and hub had many more features. In addition, I wrote SugarJar to be a wrapper for git/hub, and hub allows this but gh does not.

When gh matured, we added experimental gh support in 0.0.11, and switched the default to prefer gh in 1.0.0.

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.