gh worktree extension

Intro

This is an extremely basic extension to help me work with github and worktrees. There is another gh-worktree extension made by despreston and written in Go. His is specific to PRs and has nice completions as well, which is great (for my part, I just use gh pr list or look at the web page most of the time anyway). I had issues using his version as it didn't work nicely with certain pull requests like those from forks or dependabot.

I realize I should name this something else, but I won't remember anything else. For now I won't publish this and if he fixes that issue, I probably never will.

But I have different needs and so this also encapsulates Alex Russel's approach to checking out worktrees as a gh worktree clone step.

The whole thing is a simple bash script to simplify my life. If it gets much more complicated, it will outgrow bash and probably become a PITA, but for now this more than meets my needs.

Usage

Here's how I use it to clone a github repo:

gh worktree clone zstevearc/oil.nvim
cd oil.nvim
ls -a

.bare master

(Do this with any repo and if it's your own, no need to put the owner name). It will create a worktree for master or main and a bare repo in a hidden folder. From inside this directory, you can make a new branch with standard worktree commands like git worktree add -b my-new-fix and it will create that as a subdirectory you can switch into.

Also from this cloned folder, you can checkout PRs by doing this:

gh worktree pr 341
cd pr-341

And that's it. All the commands allow you to specify your preferred folders if you use a different setup or if you aren't in the base dir to start or whatever. So you could instead say, gh worktree pr 341 ../joes-new-feature-pr or whatever and it will put things where you hope named in a way that makes sense to you.

Install

While it isn't listed, you have to install it like so:

gh extension install zmre/gh-worktree

Or to mess around with it locally, you can call the script directly or make your mods and then install them from the checked out gh-worktree like this:

gh extension install .

Note: this may require jq to be installed and in your path depending on what happens when you use the --jq parameter to gh. I could probably remove this requirement if someone asks nicely and PRs welcome.

TODO

• Make worktree branching more efficient using script from https://github.com/llimllib/personal_code/blob/master/homedir/.local/bin/worktree
  • Make it handle direnv and yarn/npm/pnpm
  • Syntax should be something like gh worktree add branch dir and magic should ensue including that copy on write for the node_modules
• Incorporate this into nix home-manager by fetching the github repo and then symlinking it to ~/.local/share/gh/extensions/gh-worktree
  • Currently I have other installed extensions but they don't get updated and are direct checkouts of repos. Also move those into nix.
  • Maybe with programs.gh.extensions and maybe with flake inputs for that where packages don't exist?