git-cr

git-cr is a code review tool with the following goals:

• Support a PR-free workflow: in small teams with high levels of trust trunk-based development can work well, so code can be pushed to trunk before review, and reviews can be per-commit on the trunk branch.
• Reviews should live in the repository: reviews are as much a part of the codebase’s history as the commits and should live with them, not in an external system.
• Tooling should meet the developer where they are: I want to be able to review code from my terminal, and in the editor of my choosing, not in a web UI.

Pre-pre-pre alpha software

git-cr is currently a toy experimental project that does very little and should be treated with extreme caution.

Requirements

• git
• jq
• mktemp

How it works

We store code review in git notes, an underused git feature allowing you to add metadata to commits without changing the commit itself. We store these under the ref git-cr, so they don’t get in the way of any other uses git notes is being put to.

Setup

By default git notes aren’t shared, so a small amount of config is necessary to make that the case. To make git always push and fetch notes, add this to your project’s git config:

[remote "origin"]
    push = +refs/notes/*:refs/notes/*
    fetch = refs/notes/*:refs/notes/*

(replace * with git-cr if you want this to only apply to git-cr notes rather than all of them.

And for quality of life, to have notes changes in your reflog, add this to your git config:

[core]
    logAllRefUpdates = always

Usage

• git cr waiting: show commits awaiting approval
• git cr approve [SHA]: mark a commit as approved (HEAD if SHA is not supplied)
• git cr comment [SHA] -m "message": add a comment (HEAD if SHA is not supplied), optional arguments:
  • --file file the comment applies to
  • --line line number the comment applies to (--file must also be present)
  • Note this command is obviously a little clunky—the idea is to wrap this with editor tooling to make things nicer
• git cr show [SHA]: shows the status and all comments on commit (HEAD if SHA is not supplied)

Future ideas:

• review command to easily annotate a diff
• Add datetime to comments
• Comment types (e.g. "must-change", "suggestion")
• Ability to reply to specific comments