Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Using Git with Lighthouse

I wanted to set up Git integration with Lighthouse. The requirements for this was a bit different from the regular SVN integration, since in SVN every commit goes to a central repository, while Git is distributed. For the projects we wanted to integrate with Lighthouse, we use a shared Git repository which acts like the "main" repos. So when our local commits and changes gets pushed to the main repos, we want it to send a new changeset to Lighthouse, which should include the commit messages of all the new revisions since the previous push. A bit more complex than the Svn use case, but luckily Git provides some nice tools that made it quite easy. Google told me that some other guy made something similar a few days ago. However, his solution uses a post-commit hook, and thus sends every single commit to Lighthouse. Which wasn't acceptable for us, since we do a lot of small atomic commits localy. And it works against one of the nicest Git features: quick and easy branches for experimenting, since all the experimental commits would have been exposed to Lighthouse and filled up the overview screen. Summed up, we wanted to be able to make multiple local commits, and then send them as a "revision bundle" to Lighthouse and the main repos.

I solved this by setting up a both post- and pre-receive hooks on the main repos. I suspect that the pre-receive hook can be avoided, but I did the simplest thing that could possibly work. The pre-receive hook saves the current (pre-push) revision to a temporary text file, so it can be used by the post-receive hook. The post-receive hook runs a Ruby script. Most of it is taken from the script in the earlier link. The coolest line goes like this:


commit_log = `#{GIT} rev-list --pretty=short "#{oldrev}..#{newrev}" | git shortlog`


It sums up each authors commits, and shows the commit messages from each of the commits. (You can see this in action on the screenshot at the top of this post) Perfect. The script isn't as complete or elegant as it should be, but it works for now. I will edit it if I come up with something better. If anyone else makes improvements to this script I would love to hear about it (please leave a comment here, or ship me an email)!

Pre-receive hook: http://pastie.caboo.se/112536
Post-receive hook: http://pastie.caboo.se/112535

2 comments:

scott said...

Hello!

I'm glad someone else has been trying to do this other than me. Your solution is much more elegant than the hackish thing I came up with. I was treating it too much like svn. At some point I'd like to make it deal with branches better, in due time.

Thanks for the solution!

Jessica said...

Would've love to see the hooks, but I think the link is dead.