The motivation is that we're starting to feel policy drift and maintenance headaches because of non-programmable (or non-codified) repository and or organization settings.
For example we might need to remove a specific team from accessing 50/100 repos. Or we might need to enable a new github feature (like auto-merge) for all of those repos. Sometimes the codeowner forgets to enable linear history and a contributor merge-commits.
At scale, clicking buttons doesn't work.
The best solution I can come up with is a script that makes idempotent calls to the Github API. Another partial solution might be to start using monorepos.
Is there any better way to solve the problem I'm facing?
Related
for a small startup , I employed some remote developers. However, I only want to reveal the necessary codes to a certain developer, not the entire source code.
is this kind of feature offered by GitHub? If not, please provide a workaround.
Many thanks
With git repositories in GitHub there is no way to prevent a developer from cloning the whole repository and GitHub can't filter the contents of the repository to leave out part of the data. Permissions in GitHub can only prevent access to a repository, make the whole repo read-only or grant write access to the repository.
If you really want to limit access, you'll need to split your solution into multiple pieces, each in their own git repository. You can then set permissions for each repository in GitHub.
As a developer myself I caution you against this. A developer with only part if the sources would have a hard time verifying their changes work in way you intend to and it might make it much harder for them to debug any issues that happen in development.
Are there best-practice guidelines for maintaining a GitHub repository? I've contributed to many open source projects and used GitHub for projects that I work on solo, but now I'm working with a team of six developers, including myself, to build a system, and I've been placed in charge of maintaining the repository. Nothing is to get merged into our main branch without my approval. As little as I know about maintaining a GitHub repository, of those within the organization (two team members are consultants) I've the most experience with the process.
But I've never maintained a GitHub repository, and while I'm doing OK, I know that there must be a body of knowledge out there of how to handle this correctly. I just haven't been able to find it.
One hurdle I've been jumping over repeatedly, for example, is merge conflicts. Usually they're minor, but not always. Is there some known system available that allows me to enforce who has the ability to edit which files at any given time, for example?
And yes, I realize this may not be the best Stack Exchange forum, but none of the others seemed more suited to the topic.
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) serves as the vendor-neutral home for many of the fastest-growing open source projects, including Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Envoy.
As such, it can be used as a starting point for your own project: see contribute.cncf.io/maintainers/github/, which offers:
template, to be usre you have your README, LICENSE and other important files.
labels, to better classify your issues
Add also a clear "release and maintenance policy", and you should be in good shape.
Using Github's Issue Tracker, how can one create an issue tied to an organization (and not just a specific repository)?
For example, the issue might affect several repositories or the company as a whole, or the person creating the issue might not know which repository it affects.
One hackish way is to have a catch-all/generic repository where people put the general/company-wide issues, but is that the only way? (ideally this could be done in github and not in another site/service since the overall needs are not much).
Yup, creating a generic repo and storing the issues there is the only way. There's no way to create an issue for an entire organization.
Currently we are using SVN.
I would like to start using GitHub, but one absolute requirement is that we will need to have precommit (premerge) validation of the code like we currently have. Does GitHub support precommithooks (premergehooks)?
We're a team of 5 developers. We made an agreement that all code (JavaScript) should pass JSLint-like validation. Voluntary validation has proven not to work because it's easily forgotten. How can we be sure that code that becomes available to the others is guaranteed to validate against JSLint (or similar)?
The concept I was looking for was the prereceive hook
I don't believe github supports pre-commit hooks. However, the git core does. You could set up the pre-commit hooks locally, or apply them as a test before merging branches into your main github.
I think you're missing something fundamental about git. It's not a centralized model (well ok, it can be, but if you're going to use it this way then github is probably the wrong approach). If you're using github, the right way to do this is:
Host your main repo
Have your developers each create their own fork
Let them happily hack away, committing and pushing to their heart's content
When they think a feature is ready, they send a pull request to you (the maintainer) which you yourself verify on the side to ensure stability. Then you merge / rebase their changes into the main repo.
Naturally there are many ways to skin a cat. But when you're talking about "real git" (the kind employed by the open source community), the centralized "check-it-in-and-it-damned-well-better-work" model is kind of difficult, especially when it comes to larger projects.
I think this article describes a very good workflow that could be a basis for automation:
http://scottchacon.com/2011/08/31/github-flow.html
The main idea is that you use pull requests as mentioned above, but you can also have a service that can use the github api to fetch or pull the branch making the request, merge, test, validate then push to the target branch.
No, GitHub doesn't support pre-commit hooks. How would that even work? Committing happens on your computer, do you really want to allow GitHub to run arbitrary code on your machine?
I recently joined a project team that is using TFS (I have happily avoided TFS until now). I am trying to determine if there is a way to require a story/defect reference to be associated with every commit comment?
With Tortoise/SVN it was easy to add a requirement for a reference number to be required with each commit. Personally, I like to track every commit back to a user story or defect, so I am hoping there is a way make this mandatory in TFS as well? I searched SO and Google, and haven't found the magic "key words", so if someone can point me in the right direction, it would be greatly appreciated.
Note: Stories and Issues are stored in other tools and not tied to TFS in any way.
Can it be done? Yes. Is it easy? Fairly easy. However, two caveats. Caveat number one: you're going to have to write code. Codeplex has some good examples here. Additional searches on codeplex and on the almighty Google will locate you more examples.
The big caveat here is that check-in policies are client-side. Once you develop the policy, it will need to be deployed to all developer workstations. If the policy isn't installed? It is ignored. While I'm a big fanboy of TFS, this is one oversight that I can't believe is still in place after three major version releases.
You could create a server-side check-in monitor that examines the check-in and determines if the story has been associated. However, it will not prevent the check-in, but you can use it to alert someone to resolve it after the fact.
Switch to a DVCS system like Git (see this article on pre-commit hooks) or Mercurial (see this other article on pre-commit hooks) which DO have server-side hooks that can be overridden to do validation checks. :-)
Yeah, I know, not really the answer you were looking for but it is an alternative solution to the problem that some other SO users might find useful.
With the DVCS type of system, you can have a separation between hooks that run on the local computer and hooks that run on the server when your commit is pushed back to the shared repository. That kind of concept does not have a corollary in TFS. It can make some things easier for your developers. For example, every changeset that was committed to our shared repository had to have a ticket number attached in the commit message. Local pre-commit hooks guarded against changesets getting created (in Mercurial) that did not have proper commit messages.
With TFS's support for GIT in an upcoming release maybe things will be easier in this regard.