GitHub integration
SmartGit integrates GitHub workflows in various places, provided that the connection to github.com or a custom GitHub Enterprise instance has been configured in the Preferences.
Clone
When cloning a repository, you can select your repository from a list, instead of entering the URL. SmartGit will display your own (user) repositories, as well as repositories of your organization (org).
Log
In the Log window of your repository, you can interact with GitHub in following ways.
Pull Requests
When initially loading the Log, SmartGit will also refresh information on related Pull Requests from the GitHub server:
- Incoming pull requests are those which other users are requesting to pull from their repositories. They are displayed in a separate category called Pull Requests in the Branches view.
- Outgoing pull requests are those which you have sent to other users/repositories, requesting them to pull your changes. They are display directly below the local (or if it does not exist), the remote branch in the Branches view.
Incoming pull requests, in first place, are just known on the server. To get the commits, which such a pull request includes, locally, use Pull Request|Fetch. This will fetch all commits from the foreign repository to a special branch in your local repository and will create an additional merge node between the base commit from which the pull request has been forked and the latest (foreign) pull request commit. When selecting this merge node in the Graph, you can see the entire changes which a multi-commit pull request includes and you can comment on these changes, if necessary. After commenting changes, it’s probably a good idea to Reject the pull request to signal the initiator of the pull request, that modifications are required before you are willing to pull his changes. If you are fine with a pull request, you may Merge it. This will request the GitHub server to merge the pull request and then SmartGit will pull the corresponding branch, so you will have the merged changes locally available.
Outgoing pull requests can be Fetched as well, however this is usually not necessary, as the pull request belongs to you and it contains your own commits. If you decide that you want to take a pull request back, use Retract.
For a pull request which had been fetched once, there was a special ref created which will make it show up in the Pull Requests category, even if it is not present on the server anymore. In this case, you may use Drop Local Data on such a pull request to get rid of the corresponding ref, the local merge commit, all other commits of the pull request and the entry in Pull Requests as well. It’s safe to use Drop Local Data, as it will only affect the local repository and you can re-fetch a pull request anytime you like using Fetch again.
You can invoke Pull Request|Refresh to manually update the displayed information. Usually you will want to do that, if you know that server-side information has changed since the Log has been opened.
Comments
GitHub allows to comment on a commit itself or individual line changes (diffs). Comments can be applied to a commit or to a Pull Request. Comments will be refreshed together with pull requests after opening a Log or when manually invoking Pull Request|Refresh.
Commit comments will show up in the Graph view. Comments on individual lines will show up in the Changes view and the affected files will be highlighted in the Files and Graph view, too. This works the same way for line-comments of Pull Requests, provided that the pull request has been Fetched and the local pull request merge commit has been selected.
Comments can be created, modified and removed using the corresponding actions from the Comments menu or context menu actions in the Graph and Changes view. If a pull request merge commit is selected, only line-comments of the pull request can be manipulated.