stakk

stakk bridges Jujutsu bookmarks to GitHub stacked pull requests.

It is not a jj wrapper. It complements jj by reading your local bookmark state and turning it into a coherent set of GitHub PRs that merge into each other in the correct order — with stack-awareness comments, correct base branches, and idempotent updates.

Features

• Automatic stack detection — analyzes the jj change graph to find bookmark chains and their topological order.
• No bookmarks required — stakk discovers unbookmarked heads and lets you create bookmarks on-the-fly via the interactive TUI. Auto-generated stakk-<change_id> names keep things simple.
• Auto bookmark naming — the [~]auto toggle in the TUI generates descriptive bookmark names from commit descriptions and file paths using TF-IDF (term frequency–inverse document frequency) scoring. Press r to cycle through alternative names. An optional --auto-prefix lets you brand the names (e.g. gb-caching-database).
• Stacked PR submission — creates or updates GitHub PRs with correct base branches so each PR shows only its own diff.
• Stack-awareness comments — adds a comment to every PR listing the full stack with links, updated in place on re-runs. --stack-placement picks where the stack info goes: a PR comment (default), the PR body, none (write nothing and remove what is already there), or ignore (write nothing and touch nothing). See Stack info placement. Comments are rendered with minijinja templates and can be customized with --template or the STAKK_TEMPLATE environment variable.
• Idempotent — re-running stakk submit is always safe. Existing PRs are updated, never duplicated.
• Dry-run mode — --dry-run shows exactly what would happen without touching GitHub — or the repo: no bookmarks are created, nothing is pushed.
• Interactive TUI — running stakk without arguments launches a ratatui TUI: a graph view shows all branch stacks, then a bookmark assignment screen lets you toggle bookmarks on unmarked commits before submitting. Each commit cycles through: [x] existing → [~] auto → [>] typed by hand → [+] generated stakk-xxxx → [*] custom command → [ ] skip.
• Non-interactive selection — --keep/--keep-all/--new/--new-auto/--new-command build the exact same submission the TUI would, without a terminal. Pair them with stakk show --format=json for scripts and coding agents.
• Draft PRs — --draft creates new PRs as drafts.
• PR body from descriptions — PR titles and bodies are populated from jj change descriptions. By default they are only written when the PR is created, so manual edits on GitHub survive; --sync-pr-content opts into keeping them in sync.
• No direct git usage — all VCS operations go through jj commands, so workspaces and non-colocated repos work automatically.
• Forge-agnostic core — GitHub is the first implementation, but the submission logic is decoupled behind a Forge trait.

Installation

Requirements

stakk shells out to the jj CLI, which must be installed and on your PATH. The minimum supported jj version is 0.39.0. Older versions may work but are untested; stakk prints a warning when it detects one.

mise (recommended)

mise use -g 'github:glennib/stakk'

Or from crates.io:

mise use -g 'cargo:stakk'

cargo-binstall

cargo binstall stakk

cargo install

cargo install stakk

Pre-built binaries

Download from the latest release.

Quick start

# Submit interactively — pick a stack and assign bookmarks via TUI
stakk

# Works even without any bookmarks — the TUI lets you create them
stakk

# Submit a specific bookmark (and its ancestors) as stacked PRs
stakk submit my-feature

# Preview what would happen without doing anything
stakk submit my-feature --dry-run

# Create PRs as drafts
stakk submit my-feature --draft

# See your bookmark stacks without submitting
stakk show

How stacking works

In jj, bookmarks point at changes. When bookmarks form a linear chain — each building on the previous — they represent a stack. You can create bookmarks yourself, or let stakk discover unbookmarked heads and create them interactively:

trunk
  └── feat-auth        ← bookmark 1
        └── feat-api   ← bookmark 2
              └── feat-ui  ← bookmark 3

When you run stakk submit feat-ui, stakk:

1. Analyzes the change graph to find the stack containing feat-ui and all its ancestors (feat-auth, feat-api, feat-ui).
2. Plans the submission by checking GitHub for existing PRs, determining which bookmarks need pushing, which PRs need creating, and which base branches need updating.
3. Executes the plan: pushes bookmarks, creates or updates PRs with correct base branches, and adds stack-awareness comments to every PR.

The result on GitHub:

• feat-auth → PR targeting main
• feat-api → PR targeting feat-auth
• feat-ui → PR targeting feat-api

Each PR shows only its own diff, and a stack comment on every PR links all related PRs together. The comment draws the stack the same way stakk show and the TUI do — leaf at the top, trunk at the bottom — and marks the PR you are looking at:

Stack of 3 PRs — merges into main

○ #14 feat-ui
● #13 feat-api ← this PR
○ #12 feat-auth
◆ main

Re-running stakk submit is always safe — it updates existing PRs rather than creating duplicates.

Stack info placement

--stack-placement (or stack_placement in a config file, or STAKK_STACK_PLACEMENT) decides where the stack overview lives on each PR:

Mode	Writes	Removes existing stack comments/body fences
comment (default)	A separate PR comment, updated in place	Yes, when migrating from body
body	A fenced section in the PR body (STAKK_BODY_START … STAKK_BODY_END)	Yes, when migrating from comment
none	Nothing	Yes, on every submit
ignore	Nothing	No — existing artifacts are left exactly as they are

Switching between comment and body migrates automatically. Content you write outside the body fences is preserved; the fenced section itself is overwritten on every run.

none and ignore both write no stack info — the difference is what happens to whatever is already on the PR. Use none to retire stakk's stack comments cleanly (for example when moving to GitHub's own stacked-PR UI). Use ignore to leave the existing comments and fences frozen in place — handy while trying another tool, or when another process owns that part of the PR. Neither mode reads or compiles a custom --template, so a broken template cannot fail a submission that will not render it.

A submission that produces a single PR is not a stack: no stack info is written, and stale artifacts from an earlier, larger stack are cleaned up (unless the mode is ignore).

Configuration

stakk loads settings from TOML config files, environment variables, and CLI flags. The full precedence order (highest to lowest):

1. CLI flags — --remote, --draft, --pr-mode, etc.
2. Environment variables — STAKK_REMOTE, STAKK_DRAFT, etc.
3. Repository config — stakk.toml found by walking up from the current directory
4. User config — ~/.config/stakk/config.toml (Linux), ~/Library/Application Support/stakk/config.toml (macOS), %APPDATA%\stakk\config\config.toml (Windows)
5. Built-in defaults

Config files

stakk discovers config files automatically — no flags needed.

Repository config is found by walking from the current directory toward the jj workspace root (the directory containing .jj/), stopping at the first stakk.toml found. The search does not continue past the repo root. To share config across multiple repos, use --config or the STAKK_CONFIG environment variable.

User config is loaded from your platform's standard config directory. On Linux this is typically ~/.config/stakk/config.toml.

Both files use the same format. When both exist, settings from the repo config take precedence — the user config fills in any fields the repo config leaves unset.

Config file format

All fields are optional. Absent fields fall back to the next level in the precedence chain.

# stakk.toml — example with all available fields

# Git remote to push to (default: "origin")
remote = "origin"

# PR creation mode: "regular" or "draft" (default: "regular")
pr_mode = "draft"

# Path to a custom minijinja template for stack comments
template = "/path/to/my-template.md.jinja"

# Where to place stack info: "comment", "body", "none", or "ignore"
# (default: "comment")
# "none" writes no stack info and removes existing stack comments/body fences
# on the next submit (e.g. if you rely on GitHub's native stacked PRs).
# "ignore" writes no stack info and leaves existing artifacts untouched.
stack_placement = "body"

# Prefix for auto-generated bookmark names (default: none)
auto_prefix = "gb-"

# Revset for discovering bookmarks (default: "mine() ~ trunk() ~ immutable()")
# Note: the default excludes bookmarks on immutable commits. Stale untracked
# remote bookmarks can pin commits immutable — clean them up with
# `jj bookmark forget --include-remotes 'glob:<pattern>'`, or drop the
# `~ immutable()` term for one run to include them.
bookmarks_revset = "mine() ~ trunk() ~ immutable()"

# Revset for discovering unbookmarked heads
# (default: "heads((mine() ~ empty() ~ immutable()) & trunk()..)")
heads_revset = "heads((mine() ~ empty() ~ immutable()) & trunk()..)"

# Sync PR title/body from commits on every submit (default: "none")
# Options: "none", "title", "body", "all"
sync_pr_content = "all"

# How to handle git commit trailers in PR bodies (default: "keep")
# Options: "keep", "strip"
trailers = "strip"

# Shell command for generating custom bookmark names
bookmark_command = "my-bookmark-namer"

# Whether to merge with the user config (default: true)
# Set to false in a repo config to ignore the user config entirely.
inherit = true

Unknown fields cause a parse error, so typos are caught early.

The inherit field

By default, repo config and user config are merged: the repo config wins for any field it sets, and the user config fills in the rest. If a repo needs to ignore the user config entirely (e.g. to enforce team-wide settings), set inherit = false in the repo-level stakk.toml:

# stakk.toml — standalone, ignores user config
inherit = false
pr_mode = "regular"
stack_placement = "comment"

inherit only has meaning in a repo config. It is not merged from the user config.

Examples

User config — personal defaults across all repos:

# ~/.config/stakk/config.toml
pr_mode = "draft"
stack_placement = "body"

Repo config — override remote for this repo, inherit everything else:

# stakk.toml (in repo root)
remote = "upstream"

With both files above, running stakk submit my-feature uses remote = "upstream" from the repo config and pr_mode = "draft", stack_placement = "body" from the user config. Passing --pr-mode regular on the command line overrides all of them.

Team-enforced config — no user config inheritance:

# stakk.toml (in repo root)
inherit = false
remote = "origin"
pr_mode = "regular"
stack_placement = "comment"

Environment variables

Variable	Description
STAKK_CONFIG	Path to config file, overrides automatic discovery (overridden by --config)
STAKK_REMOTE	Default git remote to push to (overridden by --remote)
STAKK_PR_MODE	PR creation mode: regular or draft (overridden by --pr-mode)
STAKK_DRAFT	Set to true to always create draft PRs (overridden by --draft)
STAKK_TEMPLATE	Path to a custom minijinja template for stack comments (overridden by --template)
STAKK_STACK_PLACEMENT	Where to place the stack info: comment (default), body, none, or ignore (overridden by --stack-placement)
STAKK_AUTO_PREFIX	Prefix for auto-generated bookmark names (overridden by --auto-prefix)
STAKK_SYNC_PR_CONTENT	Sync PR title/body from commits: none (default), title, body, or all (overridden by --sync-pr-content)
STAKK_TRAILERS	Whether to keep or strip git commit trailers in PR bodies: keep (default) or strip (overridden by --trailers)
STAKK_BOOKMARK_COMMAND	Shell command for generating custom bookmark names (overridden by --bookmark-command)
STAKK_BOOKMARKS_REVSET	Revset for discovering bookmarks (overridden by --bookmarks-revset)
STAKK_HEADS_REVSET	Revset for discovering unbookmarked heads (overridden by --heads-revset)
GITHUB_TOKEN	GitHub personal access token (see stakk auth setup)
GH_TOKEN	Alternative to GITHUB_TOKEN

CLI flags take precedence over environment variables, which take precedence over config files. See Configuration for the full precedence order.

Usage

Global flags

Flag	Env var	Description
--config <path>	STAKK_CONFIG	Load this config file instead of discovering stakk.toml
--version		Print the stakk version
--help		Print help; --help on a subcommand shows its full flag documentation

stakk (no arguments)

Launches the interactive submission flow. A ratatui TUI shows a graph of all branch stacks; select a leaf branch, then toggle bookmarks on commits that need them. Works even in repos with no pre-existing bookmarks — stakk creates stakk-<change_id> bookmarks for unmarked commits. Equivalent to stakk submit without arguments.

stakk submit [bookmark]

Submit a bookmark and all its ancestors as stacked PRs. When run without a bookmark argument, an interactive ratatui TUI lets you select a branch from a graph view, then assign bookmarks to any unmarked commits before submitting.

Flag	Env var	Description
--dry-run		Show the submission plan without executing
--keep <bookmark>		Non-interactive: keep an existing bookmark as a PR boundary (repeatable)
--keep-all		Non-interactive: keep every existing bookmark on the selected path
--new <rev>[=<name>]		Non-interactive: new bookmark at rev — stakk-<change_id> by default, or name (repeatable)
--new-auto <rev>		Non-interactive: new TF-IDF-named bookmark at rev, honoring --auto-prefix; falls back to stakk-<change_id> when nothing can be derived or the name is taken (repeatable)
--new-command <rev>		Non-interactive: new bookmark at rev named by --bookmark-command (repeatable)
--pr-mode <mode>	STAKK_PR_MODE	Create new PRs as regular (default) or draft
--draft	STAKK_DRAFT	Shortcut for --pr-mode draft; wins if both are given
--remote <name>	STAKK_REMOTE	Push to a specific remote (default: origin)
--template <path>	STAKK_TEMPLATE	Use a custom minijinja template for stack comments
--stack-placement <mode>	STAKK_STACK_PLACEMENT	Place stack info as a PR comment (default), in the PR body, or write none with none/ignore — see Stack info placement
--auto-prefix <prefix>	STAKK_AUTO_PREFIX	Prefix for [~]auto bookmark names (e.g. gb-)
--sync-pr-content <mode>	STAKK_SYNC_PR_CONTENT	Sync PR title/body from commits: none (default), title, body, all
--trailers <mode>	STAKK_TRAILERS	Keep or strip git commit trailers in PR bodies: keep (default), strip
--bookmark-command <cmd>	STAKK_BOOKMARK_COMMAND	Shell command that names bookmarks, enabling the [*] TUI state and --new-command
--bookmarks-revset <revset>	STAKK_BOOKMARKS_REVSET	Which bookmarks become stack segments (default: mine() ~ trunk() ~ immutable())
--heads-revset <revset>	STAKK_HEADS_REVSET	Which unbookmarked heads are discovered (default: heads((mine() ~ empty() ~ immutable()) & trunk()..))

The selection flags (--keep, --keep-all, --new, --new-auto, --new-command) replace the TUI with a fully explicit, scriptable selection; they conflict with the positional bookmark argument and are deliberately CLI-only (no env vars, no config keys — like --dry-run, per-invocation decisions make surprising defaults). The marks fully determine the PR set: nothing is implicit. All marks must lie on one trunk-to-tip path, the topmost mark is the tip of the submission, and bookmarks on the path that are not kept fold into the PR above them. rev is a change id or commit id prefix as printed by stakk show. Bare --keep-all requires the choice of stack to be unambiguous — a single stack, or several that agree on their bookmarks (e.g. differing only in unbookmarked heads such as the working copy); anchor it with --keep/--new otherwise. Commits already carrying an explicit mark are skipped by --keep-all (explicit beats bulk).

Agent / scripting usage

Non-interactive submission is a two-command loop — discover, then submit. Everything stakk submit needs (change id prefixes, bookmark names) is in stakk show's output:

stakk show --format=json | jq '.stacks[0].segments[].commits[] | {short_change_id, description, local_bookmark_names}'
stakk submit --keep base --new qzvs=my-feature --new-auto wmtk --dry-run
stakk submit --keep base --new qzvs=my-feature --new-auto wmtk

--dry-run is fully inert: it prints the planned bookmark creations and PR actions without creating, pushing, or changing anything — safe for validation before the real run. Selection errors carry machine-readable diagnostic codes (stakk::selection::*) and point back at stakk show.

PR titles and bodies

PR titles come from the first line of the jj change description. PR bodies are populated from the full description (everything after the title line). For segments with multiple commits, descriptions are joined with --- separators. By default, titles and bodies are only set on PR creation — manually edited PR descriptions are never overwritten. Use --sync-pr-content to update existing PRs: title syncs only the title, body only the body, or all for both. Only fields that actually changed are updated.

Descriptions are reflowed on the way into the PR body: hard-wrapped prose lines are joined into soft-wrapped paragraphs, so a commit message wrapped at 72 columns does not render as ragged lines on GitHub. Structural Markdown — headers, lists, tables, block quotes, fenced and indented code, thematic breaks — is passed through verbatim.

--trailers strip removes the trailing key/value block (Signed-off-by, Co-authored-by, Refs, …) from the generated body; the default keep passes it through.

Custom bookmark names

--bookmark-command names bookmarks with an external program. The command is run through sh -c (Unix) or cmd /C (Windows), receives a JSON description of one segment of commits on stdin, and must print a single bookmark name on stdout. It powers the [*] state in the TUI and the --new-command selection flag.

The full JSON schema, with a worked example, is in stakk submit --help.

Immutable commits

Commits that jj considers immutable cannot get a new bookmark: the default bookmarks revset excludes immutable(), so stakk would create a PR it could never see again on the next run. The TUI locks such rows to [ ] and explains why, --new <rev> on one fails with stakk::selection::rev_immutable, and the commits are annotated in stakk show. A row only unlocks when the commit is a real segment boundary — a bookmark exists on it and the bookmarks revset does not filter that bookmark out (the default ~ immutable() term does). So if you really need a PR there, create the bookmark yourself and drop ~ immutable() from --bookmarks-revset; otherwise move the work onto mutable commits.

stakk show

Display repository status and all bookmark stacks without submitting. Fully offline: only jj is queried, never GitHub — PR state is stakk submit --dry-run's job.

Flag	Env var	Description
--format <format>		Output format: pretty (default) or json
--bookmarks-revset <revset>	STAKK_BOOKMARKS_REVSET	Which bookmarks become stack segments
--heads-revset <revset>	STAKK_HEADS_REVSET	Which unbookmarked heads are discovered

The default pretty format renders a jj-log-style graph of all stacks, always fully expanded. Every commit row carries its short change id, bookmarks, and description summary; immutable commits and bookmarks excluded by the bookmarks revset are annotated:

Default branch: main
Remote: origin git@github.com:you/repo.git (you/repo)

 ○  wmtk  feat-a  (no description set)
 ○  wmtl  "feat a work"
 │ ○  rlkv  feat-b  "feat b work"  (immutable — bookmark old-mark excluded by --bookmarks-revset)
 ├─╯
 ○  qzvs  base  "extend base"
 ○  qzvt  "add base"
 ◆  trunk

Bookmarks whose history contains a merge commit cannot be stacked and are left out of the graph; when that happens, pretty prints a (N bookmark(s) excluded due to merge commits) footer.

stakk show and stakk submit build the graph the same way, so --bookmarks-revset/--heads-revset (and their config keys) apply to both — what show prints is what submit would work on.

--format=json emits a schema-versioned JSON document for machine consumption (scripts, agents). Identifiers in the document — change id prefixes and bookmark names — can be passed directly to stakk submit.

• schema_version — currently 1; bumped on breaking schema changes
• default_branch
• remotes[] — name, url, github (owner/repo, or null for non-GitHub remotes)
• excluded_bookmark_count — bookmarks excluded due to merge commits
• stacks[] — one per leaf, trunk-to-leaf; shared ancestor segments are repeated in every stack that contains them
  • segments[] — bookmark_names[] and commits[] (oldest first)
    • each commit: change_id, short_change_id, commit_id, description (full), author (name, email, timestamp), files[], is_immutable, local_bookmark_names[] (unfiltered — includes bookmarks the bookmarks revset excluded), is_boundary (the commit its segment's bookmarks point at), is_leaf (the tip of its stack)

stakk completions <shell>

Generate shell completions. Supported shells: bash, zsh, fish, elvish, powershell.

# Zsh — add to your fpath
stakk completions zsh > ~/.zfunc/_stakk

# Bash
stakk completions bash > ~/.local/share/bash-completion/completions/stakk

# Fish
stakk completions fish > ~/.config/fish/completions/stakk.fish

stakk auth test

Validate that GitHub authentication is working and print the authenticated username.

stakk auth setup

Print instructions for setting up authentication. stakk resolves a GitHub token in this order:

1. GitHub CLI (gh auth token) — recommended
2. GITHUB_TOKEN environment variable
3. GH_TOKEN environment variable

Design

stakk never calls git directly. All git operations go through jj subcommands (jj git push, jj git remote list, etc.). This means stakk works automatically in jj workspaces and non-colocated repositories — two cases where calling git directly fails.

All forge interaction goes through a Forge trait. GitHub is the first (and currently only) implementation, but the core submission logic is forge-agnostic. This opens the door to Forgejo, GitLab, or other platforms in the future.

The submission pipeline is split into three phases:

• Analyze — pure function, no I/O, fully testable with mock data
• Plan — queries the forge for existing PRs, determines actions
• Execute — pushes bookmarks, creates/updates PRs, manages comments

This separation makes the business logic testable without hitting real APIs, and --dry-run falls out naturally (run phases 1 and 2, skip 3).

License

MIT OR Apache-2.0