@shadowspawn/forest-arborist
v13.0.0
Published
Forest Arborist. A loosely coupled repository manager inspired by Mercurial subrepositories, npm, and Git.
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Forest Arborist
Overview
Work with a forest of repositories as easily as using a single repo: from fab clone
, through fab pull
and fab status
, to custom commands.
Supports Git and Mercurial repositories. Tested on macOS, Windows, and Linux.
Aims to be lightweight and coexist with other tooling, rather than intrusive and opinionated. Adds a manifest file in the seed repo and a marker file at the root of the forest.
Most commands can be run from anywhere in the forest.
Terminology:
- forest: a collection of repositories and their working trees
- root: directory at the root of the forest
- manifest: lists dependent repositories and forest configuration
- seed repository: where the manifest is stored
Installation
Requires node
and npm
.
npm install --global @shadowspawn/forest-arborist
fab help
Forest Management Commands
To add fab
to an existing forest you run init
from the seed repo where you want the manifest to be stored.
fab init --nested
from root repo for a nested forestfab init --sibling
from seed repo for a sibling forest, with root up one directory
You clone
a seed repo to get the forest. This uses the manifest to find the dependent repos and forest layout.
fab clone ssh://user@host:/path
If you have more than one combination of repos you use, such as different platform libraries or production vs development, you can specify a manifest name:
fab init --sibling --manifest mac
fab clone --manifest mac ssh://user@host:/path
To (re)install dependent repos if the manifest has changed, or install dependent repos after cloning just the seed repo:
fab install
Utility Commands
To see a compact status listing for each repo in the forest:
fab status
To pull new changesets:
fab pull
There are two commands which take an explicit additional command to run across the forest. A --
is used to mark the end of the fab
options, and is optional if there are no options in the additional command. (free is explained in Dependent Repository Types)
fab for-each git remote -v
fab for-free git branch
There are two commands which run specifically git
or hg
commands across the forest repositories of matching type:
fab git remote -v
fab hg summary
Working With Branches
You can specify the starting branch when you make the clone:
fab clone --branch develop ssh://user@host:/path
There are commands to make a new branch and to switch to an existing branch:
fab make-branch feature/bells
fab make-branch --publish feature/working-with-others
fab switch trunk
The branch commands operate on the free repositories, and not the pinned or locked repositories. (See Dependent Repository Types.)
Reproducing Forest State
There are three commands for reproducing forest state:
snapshot
produces a listing of the current forest and changesetsrestore
takes the current forest back to the snapshot staterecreate
is like clone but takes a snapshot file
Example commands:
fab snapshot --output ~/snapshot1
git pull
fab restore ~/snapshot1
cd ~/sandpit
fab recreate ~/snapshot1 myTempRepo
Dependent Repository Types
Some of the repositories you work with are actively developed along with the seed repo, while some might actively track the release branch of a library, and some should stay fixed at a specific version.
The dependent repos can be configured in three ways:
- pinned to a specified changeset or tag
- locked to a specified branch
- free to follow the seed repo
The various commands operate on an appropriate subset of the repos. For example the switch command only affects the free repositories, the pull command affects free and locked, and the status command runs on all the repos.
Manifest Files (Internals)
The manifest specifies the forest layout and the dependent repository details. The manifest file can be automatically generated by:
fab init --nested
from root repository for a nested forestfab init --sibling
from seed repo for a sibling forestfab init --sibling --manifest name
to save a custom manifest
You can manage the manifest contents with the manifest
command:
fab manifest path
show path to manifestfab manifest edit
open manifest in editorfab manifest list
list dependencies from manifestfab manifest add newRepo
add entry to manifest dependenciesfab manifest delete staleRepo
delete entry from manifest dependencies
The dependencies map is where you might do some hand editing. The map key is the working directory relative to the root of the forest. The properties are:
- origin: remote repo. Either absolute or relative to the seed origin.
- repoType: "git" or "hg"
- pinRevision: if pinned, changeset or tag
- lockBranch: if locked, branch name
Example:
{"dependencies": {
"Libs/Locked": {
"origin": "[email protected]:Person/Locked.git ",
"repoType": "git",
"lockBranch": "trunk"
},
"Libs/Pinned": {
"origin": "[email protected]:Person/Pinned.git ",
"repoType": "git",
"pinRevision": "ce12a1b401e72f7808ab3da7a696a5ab4cd364fe"
},
"RelativeFree": {
"origin": "../relative-to-seed.git",
"repoType": "git"
}
},
"rootDirectory": ".",
"seedPathFromRoot": "."
}
The manifests are stored in the .fab
folder of the seed repo.
Custom manifests follow the template <custom>_manifest.json.
Command-line Tab Completion
To install command-line tab completion, write the output of fab completion
to a suitable location to be executed, whether via your shell startup file or in a location which is read by the system. See fab completion
for installation examples.
(c.f. npm completion)
Colour Output
Colour output is off by default on Windows and on by default for other platforms. You can explicitly enable or disable colour using FORCE_COLOR, or disable colour using NO_COLOR.
Developing
| Branch | Build Status | | --- | --- | | develop | |
Quick start:
git clone --branch develop [email protected]:shadowspawn/forest-arborist.git
cd forest-arborist
npm install
npm link
npm run test