Tag Archives: git

Rollback a commit in git, while maintaining history

Published Jul 8, 2013 | In Unix/Server Stuff

I use git for pretty much all my projects these days. When ever I do a commit, I make sure that it is atomic and has a proper commit message. One of the main reason why I keep the commits atomic is that, I can rollback the commit if needed.

Recently, I faced a situation, where in one of my projects, the feature I added a couple of commits back wasn’t working properly and I decided to completely get rid of it. Since I follow semantic versioning, I wanted to make sure that I maintain the different release of my project properly.

After a bit of digging up, I found the exact command in git to do that. Since the command was not that intuitive I thought of documenting it here, so that I know where to lookup when I face the situation again 😉

Problem

Let me explain problem properly. Let’s assume that I have the following list of commits in my history.

A -> B -> C -> D -> E

The head is at E now. The feature that I was talking about was introduced in commit C. Now I want to rollback the changes that I did in commit C, after E, but still maintain the history. In short I want the commits to look like

A -> B -> C -> D -> E -> C'

where C' is the opposite of C

Solution

I could have manually removed that changes I did in commit C. But being a fan of fancy one-liners, I was looking for a solution and found that there is a command in git which can do this for you.

All you need to do is to execute the following command.

git revert 'SHA_of_C'

It’s really fascinating to see, how the developers of git have thought of these different cases 🙂

Posted in Unix/Server Stuff | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Developing WordPress Plugins in Github

Published Feb 19, 2013 | In WordPress

As most of you know, I actively develop and main more than 20 WordPress Plugins. All of them are hosted in the official WordPress Plugin repository.

Until recently I was using the official WordPress repository’s svn to do the development. All my non-WordPress pet projects are hosted in my github account.

I was thinking of moving all my WordPress Plugins to github for quite sometime now, but didn’t do it thinking that it might involve huge effort to keep both the repos in sync.

After reading about how a couple of people moved (and didn’t face much problem afterwards), I decided to try it out for a couple of my Plugins. The following is what I did and in the end, figured out that it was worth the effort.

Github – more than just code

To be fair to official WordPress Plugin repository, there is nothing anything wrong with the way it works or with svn.

It is just that github as a platform is more suited if you are interested in collaboration and receiving contributions from users. It reduces the barrier to entry for people to contribute to projects and also it provides enough tools for project owners to easily merge (or reject) contributions from users.

I was more interested in this aspect of github rather than the ‘git’ part.

Using github for hosting WordPress Plugins

When I decided to move from svn to github, I wanted to do the following things.

  • I wanted to maintain the entire check-in history from svn. Some of my Plugins are more than 4 years old and have gone through lot of revisions and I didn’t wanted to loose them.
  • I also wanted to do the development in github (read doing atomic check-ins) and then upload to WordPress repository only when I tag the changes for release after testing them.
  • I also didn’t wanted to manually check-in in both the places to do the sync.

For the first I found that git-svn can fetch all the check-in history.

For the second and third point, keeping pragmatism in mind, I ended up creating shell scripts so that I don’t have to do anything manual.

Automation scripts

You can get the scripts that I wrote from my github account. The project consists of two scripts.

  • clone-from-svn-to-git.sh – Use this script to clone your WordPress Plugins from SVN into git/github
  • deploy-plugin.sh – Use this script to push your WordPress Plugin updates to SVN from gi/github

Right now the documentation is pretty sparse. I will fix it when I get some free time 🙂

Things to improve

The scripts pretty much do the job. Going forward, I want to improve the following to make it more useful.

  • The readme.txt file used by WordPress repository is not fully in markdown. Because of which the readme file displayed in github is slightly broken.
  • Ability to auto update the .pot file before releasing the new version
  • WordPress repository allows you to add a banner using the assests/ directory. Need to add support for that.

Update: All the above features are added. Check out the latest code in github.

Is it worth the effort?

So far I have moved the following Plugins to github. Will be moving the other ones as well when even I get some free time.

So now the real question. Is it worth the effort? It is worth every second that I spent on it.

You should check the pull requests I have received so far. I have received more contributions to my Plugins in the last couple of weeks than the last 5 years 🙂

If you are a WordPress Plugin developer, then try out my script and let me know if you have any feedback.

Posted in WordPress | Tagged , , , , | 8 Comments

Contributing to project hosted in Github

Published Jan 7, 2013 | In Unix/Server Stuff

As most of you know, I host most of my projects which I have released as open source in Github. I am open for collaboration and generally accept most of the pull requests that people send me.

Recently I noted that not all people who want to contribute are proficient with git or Github. So here is a small guide to help people who are interested in contributing to projects hosted at Github.

Before we proceed just keep in mind, that this is not the only way to do it. But if you are just starting out using git or Github, then this is a good starting point.

Fork the project in Github

The first step is to fork the project at Github. Go to the project that you want to contribute to and then click the fork button near the top right corner.
github-fork

Clone the forked project to your machine

When you fork the project, Github creates the forked project in your account. Once you forked the project, you need to clone it to your machine.

You can use the following command to do it.

git clone git@github.com:sudar/wp-irc.git

Replace it with your actual username and project name

Create a new branch

The next step is to create a new branch. You can use the following command to do that.

git checkout -b branch_name

Commit your changes

After you have made the changes, you have to commit them to the new branch

git add file_name

or

git add -p file_name

Then do

git commit -m "Your commit message"

Remember to have a meaning full commit message. If possible follow this guide by Tim Pope on how to construct a good commit message.

Push the change to Github

Next you have to push the changes to Github. You can do it by using the following command.

git push -u origin branch_name

Send a pull request

Now go to Github and send a pull request, by clicking the pull request button in Github. The owner of the repo will be notified and he may choose to accept or reject the request.

Keeping your repo upto date

Once the pull request is accepted, you can merge the changes back to your repo by using the following commands.

git remote add upstream git://github.com/sudar/wp-irc.git

git checkout master

git pull --rebase upstream master

git push origin master

Posted in Unix/Server Stuff | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

Consolidated all my code in github

Published Feb 28, 2010 | In Random/Personal

I got introduced to Git and Gitbub by Yuvi and ever since I have been hooked up. I have started using it for all my pet projects. I even convinced Steve Bruner so that I can use Github for RoloPress. 🙂

Over the years I have released lot of code out in the wild and I thought of consolidating all of them in Github, so that it can be of use to someone who might need them. At last I found some time and uploaded most of them to my Gitbub account.

Below is the description of some of those projects which are currently there in my Github account.

Bright Light

Bright Light is the WordPress theme, which is powering up my blog. I have released it out hoping that it might be useful for someone.

Android Samples

I created this project to share my homework and the sample code used in the “Developing Android Applications in Java” online class, which I am currently following.

RoloPress core and RoloPress Default

These projects contain my contribution to RoloPress, a WordPress based contact manager. You can read more about WordPress from its homepage.

FeedBurner – stats

FeedBurner-stats is a Google Gadget which allows you to keep track of your Feedburner subscriber count. It uses Google Chart API and Google Gadget API.

Bloglines Notifier

Bloglines Notifier is a Google Gadget which will notify you the count of unread items in your Bloglines account. (Hope someone is still using Bloglines 😉 )

Retweet

It is a fork of John Resig’s retweet script which I am using in my Easy Reweet WordPress Plugin. I have added a new feature to this script which allows you to associate the list of urls created to your bit.ly account.

Count Words

It’s a small Ruby script which prints the number of words (with their count) present in a given text file

Bulk unrar

It is a small Ruby script which unrars all files found in all the subdirectories of a director given in the command line.

I am still undecided about porting my WordPress Plugins from the official WordPress Plugin repository to Github. I guess it is better to have my Plugins in the Plugin repository for now.

Update (Feb-2013): I have now started to use github for my WordPress Plugins as well.

BTW feel free to fork any of these projects and I would be happy to pull in your changes if you have added some enhancements to them. 🙂

Posted in Random/Personal | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments