autorebase 0.3.0

Automatically rebase feature branches onto master
Documentation

Autorebase

I work on a repo with a fast-moving master branch and it gets pretty tedious typing

git switch master
git pull
git switch add_tests
git rebase master
git switch implement_feature
git rebase master
git switch implement_another_feature
git rebase master
git switch fix_bug
git rebase master
...

This program tries to do that for you. If there's a conflict it tries to rebase the branch as far as it can without conflicts. It's sort of finished.

Installation

Download a binary release from the Github releases page, or you can run

cargo install autorebase

Usage

Simply run autorebase in your repo. This will perform the following actions

  1. Update master, by pulling it with --ff-only unless you have it checked out with pending changes.
  2. Create a temporary work tree inside .git/autorebase (this is currently never deleted but you can do it manually with git worktree remove autorebase_worktree).
  3. Get the list of branches that have no upstream, and aren't checked out with pending changes.
  4. For each branch:
  5. Try to rebase it onto master.
  6. If that fails due to conflicts, abort and try again for the previous commit.
  7. Keep retrying until we get to not rebasing at all.
  8. If we didn't manage to rebase all the way to master, then mark the branch as "stuck" so it isn't attempted in future. To "unstick" it, rebase manually or add more commits to the branch.

Full usage is:

autorebase [--onto <target_branch>]

<target_branch> is master by default. If you develop on develop you probably want autorebase --onto develop.

Limitations

  • It probably won't be able to rebase branches that aren't trees, i.e. branches that contain merge commits. I haven't tested this.
  • It does everything by running git on the command line rather than through a library like libgit2, which probably isn't super robust.
  • There's no way to manually specify which branches to rebase. I may add something like autorebase track my_branch at some point. Maybe.