One of the projects I was working on has the default pull-request option set to master. For whatever reason I kept forgetting to set this to develop branch. It just felt like it would stay set to develop once i created a PR with that setting…silly me.

Getting frustrated with my forgetfulness i searched for a more convenient, alternative way to send pull requests from the command line. This is how I found

git pull-request

https://github.com/jd/git-pull-request
‘git-pull-request is a command line tool to send GitHub pull-request from your terminal’

Naturally like any experiment i try, it is too good to be true when it works just by copy-pasting the commands from the instructions, because i don’t understand a lot of stuff in those instructions.

I got some missing .netrc file error. Bummer. Now I told myself: OK, if it takes me more than 10 minutes to get this pull-request from the command line working I will skip this experiment and move ahead with more important stuff on my ‘To learn list’ (darn list, it’s starting to look like a sky scraper).

16 minutes later … multiple tabs open, git settings files, .gitconfig, .netrc, security issues, more confusion … time out.

Beyond a point I get to involved in the activity, or rather too attached to the idea to give up. Especially if it would increase productivity and remove manual input. In this case, after a break I returned to the screen and found clarity.

Setup shenanigans

Below I will detail some of the steps to setup that worked for me on mac Tried to follow the instructions on: https://github.com/jd/git-pull-request

Installation — this went like a charm: pip3 install git-pull-request

  • But it worked for me because I already had Python3 installed during a weekend Hackaton :) that also took some focus to set up correctly.

This command line tool needs a config file .netrc placed in user path ~/ It looks like this:

machine github.com
editor nano
login <git user name>
password <personal access token>machine api.github.com
editor nano
login <git-user-name>
password <personal access token>

I tried it without editor and it kept throwing some error:

$EDITOR is unset, you will not be able to edit the pull-request message

So i thrown in that setting to make it go away.

The personal access token can be your plain text password but it is not recommended. Instead you can generate a token in git > developer settings > Personal access tokens > Generate new token Some also recommended to encrypt the folder where you keep these settings

After you have .netrc file in place you should be able to use the git pull-request command.

I used it like this: *switch to local branch with commits pushed to remote branch, ready for PR

git checkout <local-branch-tracking-upstream-branch>
git pull-request — target-branch develop — no-rebase

Git pull-request options

usage: git-pull-request [-h] [ — download DOWNLOAD] [ — debug] 
 [ — target-remote TARGET_REMOTE] 
 [ — target-branch TARGET_BRANCH] [ — title TITLE] 
 [ — message MESSAGE] [ — no-rebase] [ — force-editor] 
 [ — no-comment-on-update] [ — comment COMMENT] 
 [ — no-tag-previous-revision] 
 
Send GitHub pull-request. 
 
optional arguments: 
 -h, — help show this help message and exit 
 — download DOWNLOAD, -d DOWNLOAD 
 Checkout a pull request 
 — debug Enabled debugging 
 — target-remote TARGET_REMOTE 
 Remote to send a pull-request to. Default is auto- 
 detected from .git/config. 
 — target-branch TARGET_BRANCH 
 Branch to send a pull-request to. Default is auto- 
 detected from .git/config. 
 — title TITLE Title of the pull request. 
 — message MESSAGE, -m MESSAGE 
 Message of the pull request. 
 — no-rebase, -R Don’t rebase branch before pushing. 
 — force-editor Force editor to run to edit pull-request message. 
 — no-comment-on-update 
 Do not post a comment stating the pull-request has 
 been updated. 
 — comment COMMENT, -C COMMENT 
 Comment to publish when updating the pull-request 
 — no-tag-previous-revision 
 Preserve older revision when pushing

Also tried

git pull-request — target-branch master — no-rebase — force-editor

But this throws error:

bad follower token ‘editor’ (/Users/my.user/.netrc, line 2)

I wrote the people from https://github.com/jd/git-pull-request If you know how to fix this please send a message.

That’s all for this experiment. Hope this helps you to be more productive. Have fun!

Update:

To fix the editor is unset error, add this line: export EDITOR=nano

inside this file: ~/.bash_profile (mac OS)

and now whenever I write the PR command, the nano editor opens and… behold! I can edit the PR request message.