git-pr is a command line tool to create and update GitHub pull requests within stacked commits.

While working with stacked commits, we need to make change and push these commits to GitHub. Because a stack of commits has many commits, pushing them all to GitHub requires multiple invocations of git push, one for each commit, which is tedious. git-pr helps you to push all commits to GitHub and create stacked pull requests, one for each commit. The reviewers can review each PR by clicking the 👉 REVIEW 👈 link, which point to the corresponding commit for that PR. Read more at the introduction article.

I usually work with stacked PRs, as it is a great way to organize my work. Usually, I use sapling to manage my stacked PRs, and it works really well. I can make changes to multiple commits at a time by sl absorb, and push all of them by sl pr. However, a few days ago, I pushed a stack of commits with the creation of 17 PRs in one go, which were over GitHub's rate limit and got a temporary ban:

$ sl pr 2>&1 | go run ~/ws/conn/be/go/scripts/slpr
pushing 17 to https://github.com/myorganization/backend.git
created new pull request: https://github.com/myorganization/backend/pull/3310
...
created new pull request: https://github.com/myorganization/backend/pull/3319
abort: error creating pull request for f05689dca505b3ad1b526a220d7a15f46b4a9511: {
 "message": "You have exceeded a secondary rate limit and have been temporarily blocked from content creation. Please retry your request again later.",
 "documentation_url": "https://docs.github.com/rest/overview/resources-in-the-rest-api#secondary-rate-limits"
}

This left my sapling repository in a bad state. The local commits and the GitHub PRs no longer match. I can not update PRs with sapling anymore. The problem is that sapling is not compatible with my local git tools and I do not know the internal of sapling enough to be able to fix it.

$ sl pr
pushing 8 to https://github.com/myorganization/backend.git
abort: `git --git-dir /Users/i/ws/conn/be/.sl/store/git push --force https://github.com/myorganization/backend.git 447c5d073cbadd4bcc251bf8bcd46d9ec4f728bd:refs/heads/pr3320 3f0d1e3103e5246e29806f44b87f4e9289749202:refs/heads/pr3320 7403ecce2590066177a23923bbd509598fe32781:refs/heads/pr3321 8750722250395b8d7e5a2e624a5c65a42ee817e0:refs/heads/pr3322 b543123ebadcca0b1de95293fd551752e1fa0c43:refs/heads/pr3323 263fde607355872bb47305168bf1907d673b0249:refs/heads/pr3324 5b590681dbe1394b7cae9a7d1e9f823205da3cc7:refs/heads/pr3325 17137b286aa5376615a77e58f3ef71bf02a3398f:refs/heads/pr3326` failed with exit code 1: stdout:
stderr: error: dst ref refs/heads/pr3320 receives from more than one src
error: failed to push some refs to 'https://github.com/myorganization/backend.git'

So I decided to switch back to Git with git-branchless for managing stacked commits and writing this tool for pushing GitHub PRs. This tool simply adds a line Remote-Ref: <remote-branch> to each commit to manage the corresponding PR. No other magic. So I can confidently work with stacked commits again and use my Git knowledge to fix problems if they happen. Read more at this article about working with stacked PRs.

• Install github-cli and run gh login.

• Install git-branchless and run git branchless init.

• Install git-pr and put ~/go/bin/git-pr in your $PATH

  git clone https://github.com/iOliverNguyen/git-pr
  cd git-pr
  go build .
  mv git-pr ~/bin  # add it to your $PATH

git checkout [commit]
git pr

Check out the last commit in your stacked commits and call git pr to push the stack to GitHub, one PR for each commit. Add [draft] to the commit title to mark it as draft.

$ git-pr --help
Usage: git pr [options]
  -gh-hosts string
    	Path to config.json (default "~/.config/gh/hosts.yml")
  -include-other-authors boolean
    	Create PRs for commits from other authors (default to false: skip)
  -main string
    	Main branch name (default "main")
  -remote string
    	Remote name (default "origin")
  -timeout int
    	API call timeout in seconds (default 20)
  -v	Verbose output

• It associates each commit with a pull request by adding Remote-Ref: <remote-branch> to the commit message.
• It push each commit to GitHub and create or update the corresponding pull request.
• It detects the login user from github-cli.
• It adds a 👉 REVIEW 👈 link, which reviewers can click to access the corresponding commit for that PR and add comments.
• It adds a list of all PRs for that stack at the end of each PR.

MIT

I'm Oliver Nguyen. A software maker working mostly in Go and JavaScript. I enjoy learning and seeing a better version of my self each day. Occasionally spin off new open source projects. Share knowledge and thoughts during my journey. Visit my blog at olivernguyen.io, or connect with my on GitHub, LinkedIn, Twitter, Medium, and email.