restack

restack augments the experience of performing an interactive Git rebase to make it more friendly to workflows that involve lots of interdependent branches. For more background on why this exists and the workflow it facilitates, see Automatically Restacking Git Branches.

Installation

Binaries

Pre-built ARM and 64-bit binaries are available for Linux and Mac at https://github.com/abhinav/restack/releases. To install, simply unpack the archive and put the binaries somewhere on your $PATH.

For example, if you have $HOME/bin on your $PATH,

OS=$(uname -s)
ARCH=$(uname -m)
VERSION=0.5.0
URL="https://github.com/abhinav/restack/releases/download/v$VERSION/restack_${VERSION}_${OS}_${ARCH}.tar.gz"
curl -L "$URL" | tar xzv -C ~/bin restack

Build From Source

If you have Go installed, you can install restack using the following command.

$ go install github.com/abhinav/restack/cmd/restack@latest

Setup

Automatic Setup

Run restack setup to configure git to use restack.

$ restack setup

Manual Setup

If you would rather not have restack change your .gitconfig, you can set restack up manually.

Point your sequence.editor git configuration to the script generated by restack setup --print-edit-script.

$ restack setup --print-edit-script > bin/restack-edit.sh
$ chmod +x bin/restack-edit.sh
$ git config sequence.editor restack-edit.sh

The generated script will rely on the restack edit command if available, falling back to your GIT_EDITOR if not.

You can also bypass the checks performed by the script and point sequence.editor to the restack edit command directly.

$ git config sequence.editor 'restack edit'

See restack edit --help for the different options accepted by restack edit.

Usage

restack automatically recognizes branches being touched by the rebase and adds rebase instructions which update these branches as their heads move.

The generated instruction list also includes an opt-in commented-out section that will push these branches to the remote.

For example, given,

o master
 \
  o A
  |
  o B (feature1)
   \
    o C
    |
    o D (feature2)
     \
      o E
      |
      o F
      |
      o G (feature3)
       \
        o H (feature4, HEAD)

Running git rebase -i master from branch feature4 will give you the following instruction list.

pick A
pick B
exec git branch -f feature1

pick C
pick D
exec git branch -f feature2

pick E
pick F
pick G
exec git branch -f feature3

pick H

# Uncomment this section to push the changes.
# exec git push -f origin feature1
# exec git push -f origin feature2
# exec git push -f origin feature3

So any changes made before each exec git branch -f will become part of that branch and all following changes will be made on top of that.

Credits

Thanks to @kriskowal for the initial implementation of this tool as a script.