Pull request checkout with no 'leftovers'

[rcorre]

I often checkout a pull request as a one-time thing. I want to take a look at the code and run it, but afterwards I'll switch back to my own branches and don't want a new remote or branch hanging around. It would be nice to have --no-remote and --no-branch flags for hub checkout.

I would expect --no-remote to do:

git fetch <remote-url>
git branch user-branchname FETCH_HEAD
git checkout user-branchname

With --no-branch it would be:

git fetch <remote-url>
git checkout FETCH_HEAD

Does this sound useful? I'd be happy to take a stab at it (I'd like to learn some go).

[mislav]

That's not a bad idea. I definitely already have a plan to change the checkout command to never add a remote, since those can pile up over time and are not very useful. The branch is another topic, though. By default a branch will definitely be created, but I'll consider your --no-branch option to avoid creating a branch and put you to detached head instead.

Since I plan to refactor checkout significantly, you don't have to make a contribution right now, since it will likely conflict with the other changes. So don't worry about making the PR right now! But If you'd like to learn some Go, there are definitely other issues in the projects that need attention… 😉

[rcorre]

Thanks, sounds good to me.

[mcornella]

+1.

The official github doc uses the command

git fetch origin pull/ID/head:BRANCHNAME

which avoids the git branch call.

Thanks for submitting this!

[rcorre]

Oh, that's clever, and a good workkaround in the meanwhile. Thanks!

[mcornella]

Yay thanks! 🎉

[mislav]

Mind that the new implementation still leaves a branch around. But, most importantly, it doesn't create any git remotes anymore.

[mcornella]

That's exactly what I'd expect as a user so thanks!

[rcorre]

Thanks! Not having a remote is nice, but is there any chance of adding a no-branch option to fetch to FETCH_HEAD?

[mislav]

@rcorre That shouldn't be too hard to add. Please take a look at the current checkout implementation and see if you can find your way around adding such a feature. If it's too confusing, let me know!

[rcorre]

I'll give it a shot, thanks!

[andrejserafim]

This is quite old, but perhaps it will be useful to someone. A work around is to checkout always to the same branch and remove it before the checkout, so there's always 1 branch with the last code review.

#!/usr/bin/env bash

git checkout master &&
git branch -D review &&
hub pr checkout $1 review &&
git pull upstream master