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AGit Workflow Usage

Forgejo ships with limited support for AGit-Flow. It was originally introduced in Gitea 1.13.

Similarly to Gerrit’s workflow, this workflow provides a way of submitting changes to repositories hosted on Forgejo instances using the git push command alone, without having to create forks or feature branches and then using the web UI to create a Pull Request.

Using Push Options (-o) and a Refspec (a location identifier known to Git), it is possible to supply the information required to open a Pull Request, such as the target branch or the Pull Request’s title.

Creating Pull Requests

For clarity reasons, this document will lead with some examples first.

A full list of the parameters, as well as information on avoiding duplicate Pull Requests when rebasing or amending a commit, will follow.

Usage Examples

Suppose that you cloned a repository and created a new commit on top of the main branch. A Pull Request targeting the main branch using your currently checked out branch can be created like this:

Terminal window
git push origin HEAD:refs/for/main -o topic="agit-typo-fixes"

The topic will be visible in the Pull Request and it will be used to associate further commits to the same Pull Request. Under the hood, it is essentially just a branch.

It can also be supplied directly using the <session> parameter in the Refspec, which will set the topic as topic-branch and push the local branch topic-branch instead:

Terminal window
# topic-branch is the session parameter and the topic
git push origin HEAD:refs/for/main/topic-branch

A detailed explanation illustrating the difference between using -o topic and <session> will follow shortly.

It is also possible to use some additional parameters, such as title and description. Here’s another example targeting the master branch:

Terminal window
git push origin HEAD:refs/for/master -o topic="topic-branch" \
  -o title="Title of the PR" \
  -o description="# The PR Description
This can be **any** markdown content.\n
- [x] Ok"

To be able to easily push new commits to your pull request, you first need to switch the default push method to “upstream”:

Terminal window
# To only set this option for this specific repository
git config push.default upstream
# Or run this instead if you want to set this option globally
git config --global push.default upstream

Then, run the following command:

Terminal window
git config branch.local-branch.merge refs/for/main/topic-branch

After doing so, you can now simply run git push to push commits to your pull request, without having to specify the refspec. This also will allow you to pull, fetch, rebase, etc. from the AGit pull request by default.

A More Complex Example

Suppose that the currently checked out branch in your local repository is main, yet you would like to submit a Pull Request meant for a remote branch called remote-branch.

However, the changes that you want to submit reside in a local branch called local-branch. In order to submit the changes residing in the local-branch branch without checking it out, you can supply the name of the local branch (local-branch) using the <session> parameter:

Terminal window
git push origin HEAD:refs/for/remote-branch/local-branch \
  -o title="My First Pull Request!"

This syntax may be a bit disorienting for users that are accustomed to commands such as git push origin remote-branch or git push origin local-branch:remote-branch.

Just like when using git push origin remote-branch, supplying the local branch name is optional, as long as you checkout local-branch using git checkout local-branch beforehand and use the topic push option:

Terminal window
git checkout local-branch
git push origin HEAD:refs/for/remote-branch \
  -o topic="my-first-agit-pr" \
  -o title="My First Pull Request!"

If you do not use the topic push option, <session> will be used as the topic instead.

Parameters

The following parameters are available:

  • HEAD: The target branch (required)
  • refs/<for|draft|for-review>/<branch>/<session>: Refspec (required)
    • for/draft/for-review: This parameter describes the Pull Request type. for opens a normal Pull Request. draft and for-review are currently silently ignored.
    • <branch>: The target branch that a Pull Request should be merged against (required)
    • <session>: The local branch that should be submitted remotely. If left empty, the currently checked out branch will be submitted by default, however, you must use topic.
  • -o <topic|title|description|force-push>: Push options
    • topic: Essentially an identifier. If left empty, the value of <session>, if present, will also be used for the topic. Otherwise, Forgejo will return an error. If you want to push additional commits to a Pull Request that was created using AGit, you must use the same topic.
    • title: Title of the Pull Request. If left empty, the first line of the first new Git commit will be used instead.
    • description: Description of the Pull Request.
    • force-push: Necessary when rebasing, amending or retroactively modifying your previous commits. Otherwise, a new Pull Request will be opened, even if you use the same topic. If used, the value of this parameter should be set to true.

Forgejo relies on the topic parameter and a linear commit history in order to associate new commits with an existing Pull Request.

For Gerrit users: Forgejo does not support Gerrit’s Change-Ids.