git-mr-to

git-mr-to is a plug-in command for Git that opens a Web browser at the URL for creating a new merge request. It is optimized for workflows where topic branches are merged directly to master, such as the popular GitHub Flow [github-flow].

git mr-to has varying degrees of support for, in alphabetical order, the following repository hosting services:

• Azure DevOps
• Bitbucket
• GitHub
• GitLab

See Provider support for details.

Table of Contents

• Usage
  • Provider support
  • Browser choice
• Installation
• The name
• License

Usage

Synopsis:

git mr-to [remote [destination [source]]]

remote names the remote against whose project URL to create the merge request. If only a single remote is configured in the repository, all arguments can be omitted to create a merge request from the current branch to the master branch of the configured remote.

destination names the branch to merge into. If omitted it defaults to master.

source names the branch to merge into destination. If omitted it defaults to the current branch.

Provider support

git mr-to's functionality depends on the repository hosting service provider. Here are all the supported providers and their limitations:

• Azure DevOps: limited to intra-project merge requests. Inter-project merge requests are not supported because the URL format for this scenario uses internal project IDs instead of names.

• Bitbucket: limited to intra-project merge requests. Inter-project merge requests are not supported because no working URL format for this scenario has been found.

• GitHub: full intra-project and inter-project merge request support.

• GitLab: limited to intra-project merge requests. Inter-project merge requests are not supported because the URL format for this scenario uses internal numerical project IDs instead of project names.

Inter-project support requires the downstream remote—i.e., your fork—to be named origin. If a repository has multiple configured remotes, none of which are named origin, git mr-to will not be able to infer the upstream/downstream relationship. In that case it will issue a warning but proceed, allowing the user to configure the merge request manually.

Browser choice

By default git mr-to opens the Web page using git-web--browse(1). This can be overridden using the environment variable GIT_MR_TO_BROWSER.

The following example merely prints out the merge request URL, in a technically correct but obtuse way for demonstrational purposes:

$ GIT_MR_TO_BROWSER="printf %s\n" git mr-to

This example instead opens the URL in an incognito browsing instance of Chromium (sadly, Firefox's -private counterpart works unreliably):

$ GIT_MR_TO_BROWSER="chromium --incognito" git mr-to

Installation

Place git-mr-to somewhere in your $PATH. Git will automatically detect the executable as a command and provide it as git mr-to. You can do this with make install, optionally providing PREFIX=<path> to override the default installation prefix of $HOME/.local.

The completion.sh script provides Bash completion. To install, copy it to your completion user directory's completions/ directory; default $HOME/.local/share/bash-completion/completions/:

cp completion.sh $HOME/.local/share/bash-completion/completions/git-mr-to

The name

The name of the executable is git-mr-to. The name of the project and the command provided by the executable is git mr-to. "to" is a word; "mr" is short for "merge request", the term for pro-actively submitting a change proposal against some upstream in GitLab. This term was chosen over "pull request", used by GitHub and Bitbucket, because "pull request" in Git terminology means something specific that is not precisely what GitHub and Bitbucket offer.

License

Copyright © 2018-2021 Mikkel Kjeldsen

This software is released under the GPLv2, on account of using components from the Git project v2.16.2 released under the GPLv2 [git-license].