probranchinator

This is a CLI tool that compares all branches in repository and displays how they can be merged to each other.

How it works

0. It takes a remote repository URL from command line option
1. (if necessary) Clones remote repository into temporary local repository
2. Fetches all branches from remote and prunes deleted branches
3. Compares selected branches with each other (either passed via CLI or most recently updated)
4. Outputs result in terminal

Tool compares branches with each other and shows each comparison in a table. Each entry in that table represents an attempt of merging one branch into another. You can receive one of the following results:

• ✅✅ No changes: already up-to-date
• 🚀✅ No confilcts: fast-forward merge is possible
• 🤝✅ No conflicts: automatic merge is possible
• 🚧🔧 Found conflicts, have to resolve them manually
• ❌❌ No merge is possible (usually means your branches do not have common ancestor)
• ❌🤔 Unknown merge analysis result (this is not supposed to happen really)

Note that clone, fetch and prune operations currently require git CLI to be installed and available in $PATH due to compatibility with systems/protocols. Other operations work with cloned repository directly for efficiency. Tool creates temporary local repository in system temporary directory, because analysis of normal merge conflicts leaves working tree in a potentially 'dirty' state and we don't want to mess with user's repository, where unfinished work might be present.

Installation

Download a binary from latest release and put it somewhere in your $PATH.

Tool requires git CLI to be installed and available in $PATH.

Install with script

You can also use install.sh script with bash shell. It will download the latest release and put it in /usr/local/bin directory.

curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/strowk/probranchinator/main/install.sh | bash

Only limited amount of platforms have prebuilt binaries at the moment: Linux (x86_64 gnu), macOS(x86_64, aarch64) and Windows (x86_64 gnu).

Install with cargo

In case if your platform/architecture is not supported, you might need to build the tool from source. You will need to have Rust toolchain installed.

Then you can install the tool with cargo:

cargo install probranchinator

Usage

probranchinator [OPTIONS] --remote <REMOTE> [BRANCHES]...

Example:

probranchinator --remote=https://github.com/strowk/probranchinator-test.git

If you want to examine your local repository, you can use file:// protocol:

probranchinator --remote=file://$PWD

By default probranchinator will analyse 10 most recently updated branches. You can override that by passing branches to analyse as CLI arguments:

probranchinator --remote=https://gitlab.com/git-compose/git-compose.git master test-branch-2

or by changing the amount of recent branches to analyse:

probranchinator --remote=https://gitlab.com/git-compose/git-compose.git --recent=2

To exit the program, press q or Ctrl+C.

Output Format

By default, probranchinator outputs result in interactive format as a terminal UI.

You can also output result in JSON format by passing --output=json like this:

probranchinator --remote=https://github.com/strowk/probranchinator-test.git --output=json

By default output would be prettified, but you can pass --pretty=false to disable that.

Other available formats are:

• simple - outputs each analysis result in a single line
• table - outputs result in a table format
• markdown - outputs result as a markdown table