Clean Git History

A Git history linter to ensure it stays clean for those who prefer rebasing and fast-forwarding compared to merge and squash commits.

Content

• Usage
  • Usage - Additional Arguments
  • Usage - Git Environment Variables
  • Usage - Logging
• CICD Examples
  • GitLab CI Rust Project Example
    • Via Cargo
    • Via Binary Download
  • Git Hooks Rust Project Example
• Downloading Binary
• Compiling via Local Repository
• Compiling via Cargo
• Unit Testing
• End-to-End Testing
• Issues/Feature Requests

Usage

Clean History operates upon a range of Git commits in the repositories' history. To specify the range of commits you can use either the --from-commit-hash <commit-hash> or --from-reference <reference> arguments. The range of commits starts exclusively from the commit specified till inclusively of HEAD.

The only required arguments are either --from-commit-hash <commit-hash> or --from-reference <reference>.

Usage - Additional Arguments

Additional command line flags can be passed to alter what and how the history is linted.

Usage - Git Environment Variables

When looking for a repository the Git environment variables are respected. When ${GIT_DIR} is set, it takes precedence and Clean History begins searching for a repository in the directory specified in ${GIT_DIR}. When ${GIT_DIR} is not set, Clean History searches for a repository beginning in the current directory.

Usage - Logging

The crates pretty_env_logger and log are used to provide logging. The environment variable RUST_LOG can be used to set the logging level. See https://crates.io/crates/pretty_env_logger for more detailed documentation.

CICD Examples

GitLab CI Rust Project Example

Via Cargo

See Compiling via Cargo for more details about installing via Cargo.

Note - This example downloads the latest 0.* version.

clean-git-history-checking:
  stage: clean-git-history-checking
  image: rust
  before_script:
    - cargo install clean_git_history --version ^0
  script:
    # Check all the commits in the branch.
    - /usr/local/cargo/bin/clean_git_history --from-reference "origin/${CI_MERGE_REQUEST_TARGET_BRANCH_NAME}"
  rules:
    - if: $CI_MERGE_REQUEST_ID

Via Binary Download

See Downloading Binary for more details about Binary downloads.

Note - This example downloads version 0.1.2.

clean-git-history-checking:
  stage: clean-git-history-checking
  image: rust
  before_script:
    - wget -q -O tmp.zip "https://gitlab.com/DeveloperC/clean_git_history/-/jobs/artifacts/bin-0.1.2-recompiling/download?job=release-binary-compiling-x86_64-linux-musl" && unzip tmp.zip && rm tmp.zip
  script:
    # Check all the commits in the branch.
    - ./clean_git_history --from-reference "origin/${CI_MERGE_REQUEST_TARGET_BRANCH_NAME}"
  rules:
    - if: $CI_MERGE_REQUEST_ID

Git Hooks Rust Project Example

An example pre-push Git hook to check if the history of a project is clean before it is pushed to the remote server.

#!/usr/bin/env bash

set -o errexit
set -o pipefail

root_commit_hash=$(git rev-list --max-parents=0 HEAD)
"${HOME}/.cargo/bin/clean_git_history"  --from-commit-hash "$root_commit_hash"

Downloading Binary

Statically linked compiled binaries are available for download. Visit the releases page at https://github.com/DeveloperC286/clean_git_history/releases to see all the releases, the release notes contains links to binary downloads for various architectures.

If you do not trust the provided binaries another option is to compile your own and then make it available for remote download, so your CICD etc can then download it.

Compiling via Local Repository

Checkout the code repository locally, change into the repository's directory and then build via Cargo. Using the --release flag produces an optimised binary but takes longer to compile.

git clone git@github.com:DeveloperC286/clean_git_history.git
cd clean_git_history/
cargo build --release

The compiled binary is present in target/release/clean_git_history.

Compiling via Cargo

Cargo is the Rust package manager, the install sub-command pulls from crates.io and then compiles the binary locally, placing the compiled binary at ${HOME}/.cargo/bin/clean_git_history.

cargo install clean_git_history

By default it installs the latest version at the time of execution. You can specify a specific version to install using the --version argument. For certain environments such as CICD etc you may want to pin the version.

e.g.

cargo install clean_git_history --version 0.1.2

Rather than pinning to a specific version you can specify the major or minor version.

e.g.

cargo install clean_git_history --version ^0

Will download the latest 0.* release whether that is 0.1.2 or 0.7.0.

Unit Testing

The unit test suite has several parameterised tests, Cargo is used to set up and run all the unit tests.

cargo test

End-to-End Testing

To ensure correctness as there are a variety of out of process dependencies the project has an End-to-End behaviour driven test suite using the behave framework (https://github.com/behave/behave).

To run the test suite you need to

• Compile the Clean Git History binary.
• Install Python3.
• Install Behave.
• Execute Behave.

Note - You can't use --release as the test suite uses target/debug/clean_git_history.

cargo build
cd clean_git_history/end-to-end-tests/
virtualenv -p python3 .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip3 install -r requirements.txt
behave

Issues/Feature Requests

To report an issue or request a new feature use https://github.com/DeveloperC286/clean_git_history/issues.