Tickety-Tick

How do you name this branch? What is the message for that commit?

At bitcrowd we love conventions. One of them is how we name branches and commits. This makes it easy to relate a particular branch or commit to a certain ticket.

Branches always follow the format type/id-title, where:

type is usually one of:
- feature (default)
- bug
- chore
- …
id is the identifier of the ticket in your ticketing system
title is a lowercase, dasherized version of the ticket title

Commits always contain [#id] title.

Additionally, Tickety-Tick generates git commands to set up a branch with the proper name and to prepare the commit message.

Supported ticket systems

Tickety-Tick helps you create branches and commits for a few ticket systems.

Currently, we support:

GitHub
GitLab
JIRA
Pivotal Tracker
Trello

Installation

Tickety-Tick is available for every major browser:

Chrome/Chromium
Firefox
Opera
For Safari, you need to build it yourself (see below)

Building

In order to build the extension from source, run:

yarn install
yarn run build
yarn run checks

For development use yarn run watch. This will watch the files and rebuild the extension whenever source files change.

Installing a custom-built version

Chrome

Navigate to the chrome://extensions page, enable "Developer mode" and press "Load unpacked extension". Point it to the dist/web-extension directory. Done.

Firefox

If you just want to try out and debug the extension, go to about:debugging#addons. Then press "Load Temporary Add-On" and select the manifest.json from the built extension directory.

Opera

Same process as in Chrome.

Safari

Open Safari and enable the "Developer Menu" in the application preferences. Now go to the developer menu and open the "Extension Builder". Press the "+" button and add the dist/tickety-tick.safariextension that you just built.

Development

Generating coverage reports

In order to generate code coverage reports locally, just run:

yarn run test:coverage

Then, to generate and view HTML reports:

./node_modules/.bin/nyc report --reporter lcov
open coverage/lcov-report/index.html

Insights

Generated commands

As mentioned earlier, in addition to branch names and commit messages, Tickety-Tick generates git commands to set up a branch with the proper name and to prepare the commit message.

The code generated for copying will look like this:

git checkout -b BRANCH-NAME && git commit --allow-empty -m COMMIT-MESSAGE

The generated commands make a few assumptions:

You're using git (obviously). The branch names and commit messages Tickety-Tick generates may work with other version control systems, but the commands generated for copying specifically include git.
You squash commits from feature branches (or you're okay with empty commits). When you work with feature branches and you squash them before merging, git (and GitHub) allow you to combine the messages of the feature-branch commits. The empty commit provides a simple mechanism for storing the commit message title generated by Tickety-Tick when setting up the branch.

This approach works nicely with our git workflow, for which the above assumptions are true. Yours may be different though, in which case you may still like Tickety-Tick's ability to generate the branch names and commit messages for you.

marsjaninzmarsa / tickety-tick