Git Pairing Session

A mini set of shell scripts to enable you to take advantage of commits with coauthors in Github.

Why pair?

See my blog post on the benefits of pair programming.

Why record coauthors?

• Chris Beams does a great job of explaining why good git commits are important. Git coauthors extend all the points he makes.
• Those sweet, sweet, contribution points. 💚

Installation

1. Clone this repo into your home directory. 🏠

git clone https://github.com/sadir/git-pairing-session.git $HOME/

2. Add the git-pairing-session script to your bash config (e.g. in ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bashrc).

source $HOME/git-pairing-session/git-pairing-session

3. Setup your colleagues so git-pairing-session knows who you can 🍐 with.

add_colleague ms "Morgan Sadr-Hashemi" "morgan@example.com"

Note: your colleagues email addresses must match their github email.

You can remove colleagues too if they abandon you:

remove_colleague ms

Usage

There are two options:

1. Record your coauthor as you go.
2. Retrospectively modify your branch to add your coauthor to every commit.

Option 1

1. Set up your project to be ready for recording coauthors as you go, by running this command in the root of your project (where your .git directory is).

pairing_project # symlinks a git hook to append authors to your commit messages.

Note: this will ask your permission to override your current prepare-commit-msg git hook if you have one.

2. Get pairing with someone! 💪

pairing_with ms # hand it a set of initials you set up earlier

3. When you're done, stop recording your coauthor.

no_longer_pairing

4. Eat more fruit 🍐 🍇 🍊 🍏 🍌 🍒

Option 2

1. Do your work, blissfully unaware that you've forgotten to record your coauthor.

2. Retrospectively amend your branch to add coauthors.

paired_with ms

3. Eat more fruit 🍐 🍇 🍊 🍏 🍌 🍒

Customisation

Set this variable if you cloned the repo somewhere else:

export GIT_PAIR_SESSION_DIR=$HOME/git-pairing-session

Why this repo? Why not other-repo?

I had a look at a few of these:

• pivotal/git-scripts

This one randomly attributes the commit to one member of the pair. I wanted each commit to be attributed to both.

• chrisk/git-pair

This one put both co-authors in as the commiter but that broke the way that github represented commiters. Git the vcs wasn't set up for that.

• peterjwest/git-pair

Similar to git-pair, with added downsides of not being maintained and I quite wanted something in shell script without any dependencies other than Git, rather than using JS.