salsaflow

SalsaFlow

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Overview

SalsaFlow is your ultimate Trunk Based Development (TBD) CLI utility.

Actually, I don't know about you, but we use it here at Salsita.

Installation

SalsaFlow is written in Go. Compiling has never been that fast. No more sword fighting in the corridor, sorry...

Installing from a Package

The pre-built binaries are attached to GitHub releases for this repository.

See the latest release for yourself!

So, to use the pre-built binaries,

1. download the relevant archive, then
2. copy the content to a directory in your PATH. Make sure that all the files are in the same directory.

Upgrading SalsaFlow

In case you are using the pre-built binaries and you want to upgrade you SalsaFlow to the most recent version, you case use salsaflow pkg upgrade. In fetches the artifacts attached to the latest GitHub release and replaces the current executables.

In case you need to run pkg upgrade as root, you may need to use -config flag to tell SalsaFlow here your global configuration file is. It is better, though, to place SalsaFlow executables in a directory that is writable by your usual user and just add that directory into PATH.

More about configuration is mentioned later.

Installing from Sources

1. Install Go (used Go 1.3.3, but any Go 1.x should do the trick).
2. Set up a Go workspace.
3. Add the bin directory of your workspace to PATH.
4. Run go get -d github.com/salsaflow/salsaflow. This will get the sources and put them into the workspace. You can as well just go and use git clone directly...
5. Run go get github.com/tools/godep to install godep, which handles vendoring.
6. Run make godep-install in the project directory, which puts the resulting binaries into the bin directory of the workspace.
7. Run salsaflow to make sure everything went well.

Other System Requirements

To use SalsaFlow, you will also need

• git version 1.9.x or newer in your PATH

Modules may also require some additional packages to be installed.

Usage

Well, the best thing you can do is to just run salsaflow -h and read. More in-depth SalsaFlow principes are explained on the wiki.

The complete list of SalsaFlow commands follows (links pointing to the develop docs):

• cherry-pick
• pkg install
• pkg upgrade
• release changes
• release deploy
• release notes
• release stage
• release start
• repo bootstrap
• repo init
• repo prune
• review post
• story changes
• story open
• story start
• version
• version bump

SalsaFlow can only be used when you are within a project repository (except the pkg subcommands, these can be used anywhere).

The repository is automagically initialised when you run any SalsaFlow command there, but you can also trigger the process by running repo init. SalsaFlow uses a couple of git hooks, which are installed during the initialisation process.

You probably want to read the following section about SalsaFlow configuration before doing anything serious since SalsaFlow will anyway refuse to do anything useful until it is configured properly.

Configuration

There are two places where SalsaFlow configuration is being kept:

1. The global, user-wide configuration is written into $HOME/.salsaflow.json. This file mostly contains the data that cannot be committed, i.e. access tokens and such.
2. The local, project-specific configuration is expected to be placed into .salsaflow directory in the repository root. This directory contains the local configuration file, config.json, as well as some project-specific custom scripts that are to be supplied by the user and committed into .salsaflow/scripts. More on custom scripts later.

Global Configuration

The global, user-specific configuration file resides in $HOME/.salsaflow.json. It stores module-specific configuration as a map. The exact format obviously depends on what modules are being used.

You can use -config flag with any command to specify the path to the global configuration file manually. This is handy when you need to run pkg upgrade as root using sudo. In that case $HOME is not pointing to the home directory of your usual user and SalsaFlow will fail to find the right configuration file unless told where to look for it using -config.

Local Configuration

SalsaFlow looks for the local cofiguration file in $REPO_ROOT/.salsaflow/config.json. The structure is similar to the global configuration file except the fact that it also includes the list of active modules for particular module kinds.

Too see a full example, just check the SalsaFlow config for this project.

Scripts

SalsaFlow occasionally needs to perform an action that depends on the project type, e.g. to increment the version number when handling releases. These custom actions must be configured by placing certain custom scripts into .salsaflow/scripts directory in the repository.

The following scripts must be supplied:

• get_version - Print the current project version to stdout and exit.
• set_version - Taking the new version string as the only argument, this script is expected to set the project version string to the specified value. Make sure all new files are always staged (git add), otherwise they won't get committed by SalsaFlow.

Now, to make the whole scripting thing cross-platform, it is possible to supply multiple script files for every script name and run different scripts on different platforms. So, the filename schema for the scripts that are to be placed into the scripts directory is actually <script-name>_<platform>.<runner> where

• <script-name> is the name as mentioned above, e.g. get_version.
• <platform> can be any valid value for Go's runtime.GOOS, e.g. windows, linux, darwin and so on. You can also use unix to run the script on all Unixy systems.
• <runner> is the file extension that defines what interpreter to use to run the script. Currently it can be bash (Bash), js (Node.js), bat (cmd.exe) or ps1 (PowerShell.exe). Naturally, only some combinations make sense, e.g. you cannot run PowerShell on Mac OS X, so a script called get_version_darwin.ps1 would never be executed.

Check some examples to understand better how the whole thing works.

Project Bootstrapping

To get up to speed quickly, repo bootstrap command can be used to generated the initial configuration. The user is prompted for all necessary data, no need to edit config files manually.

repo bootstrap can be also told to use certain GitHub repository to bootstrap the local configuration directory. When this bootstrapping skeleton is supplied, scripts directory of the given repository is simply poured into the local configuration directory. This can be easily used to share custom scripts for certain project type so that the scripts are implemented once and then just copied around. You can check the repository that was used to bootstrap SalsaFlow itself.

Modules

SalsaFlow interacts with various services to carry out requested actions. The only supported VCS is Git, so that part is hard-coded in SalsaFlow, but other serviced are configurable in the local configuration file, namely:

• the issue tracking module,
• the code review module, and
• the release notes module (optional).

repo bootstrap lists the available modules during repository bootstrapping. The values actually listed depend on what modules are compiled into SalsaFlow. You don't really need to understand much about modules unless you feel like implement a new module for SalsaFlow. The user is prompted for all necessary data when bootstrapping the project, which is a one-time action, and then the active modules are simply used by SalsaFlow transparently.

Original Authors

• tchap (for Salsita)
• realyze (for Salsita)

License

MIT, see the LICENSE file.