Tooling and practices that you might find useful

Objectives

• A bird’s eye view of git-related tooling

• Install and configure 1 tool of your choice so that you can start using it

Difftools and merge tools.

There are many file types for which the usual output of git diff can be from difficult to read to just completely impossible to understand.

• For Jupyter notebooks: nbdime

• For Latex: Latexdiff (not git-related) and git-latexdiff. Latex is still a text-based format, but a PDF-rendered view of the differences can be more readable.

• There are also tools for images (e.g., git-diff-image)

Automation: Git Hooks

Git can be configured to perform some tasks automatically when some events happen.

Most notable tasks:

• auto-formatting: is your code properly formatted? This is important because:

  • proper formatting improves readability

  • consistently using automatic formatting makes the output of git diff much more informative (for easier code reviews) There are tools for every language you use:

  • for Python: black

  • for C/C++: clang-format

• Linting: there are automated tools that can spot bad practices in writing code

  • for Python: pylint

  • for C/C++: clang-tidy

  • for bash shell scripts: shellcheck

• Spellchecking (useful for documentation)

• compiling/building, deploying services or documentation

• Launch a test suite

Such tasks can be performed as part of a git hook. Git hooks are executable programs in the .git/hooks/ directory.

The most commonly used is the pre-commit hook, which runs when you call git commit, before the commit message is created. Auto-formatting, linting tools and anything that is quick enough can be run here.

Try them out!

Install and/or configure some of the mentioned tooling that can be helpful for your daily workflow.

Another hook typically used is post-receive. When it is configured on a remote repository, it runs after a push. The post-receive hook is typically used to start the run of a test suite, or to notify other services that the push happened.

Automation: GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD (et similia)

Automation platforms like, e.g. GitHub actions and GitLab CI/CD build on top of the idea of the post-receive hook, and are commonly used for (including but not limited to):

• run a test suite and present the results in a web interface;

• build the software and make it available for download;

• build and deploy documentation.