Gerrit/git-review

git-review is a command-line tool for Git / Gerrit. It makes it easier to configure your Git clone, to submit a change or to fetch an existing one.

The upstream project is led by OpenStack. Is not to be confused with the unrelated Facebook project.

Installation

 * See also Gerrit/Tutorial.

After installing git (1, 2), creating a gerrit user account, setting up an ssh key (3, 4), and cloning a project repository (or example), you are ready to install git-review, a tool to simplify working with Gerrit repositories so you don't have to remember some pretty confusing commands. Follow the instructions below for your operating system, and don't forget to set it up afterwards!

If you can, it is recommended to install version 1.21 - it's buggy, but others seem to have worse bugs, especially if working with many different repositories.

Debian
Users of Debian or related distributions (e.g., Ubuntu, Mint) on a shared host usually do not have root access. If you cannot get you hosting administrator to install git-review for you, you can try to install it locally. Go to the appropriate section below

Having root access
You can do or

If you do not have easy_install set up, try

If you don't have  but have   installed (e.g. on OS X), you can use this: Then run:

in your cloned copy to setup to work with Gerrit. It will probably ask you for your commit username. Then it will automatically install the commit-msg hook.

Without root access
If you are on a shared host and your system does not have git-review, you can install it locally in your user directory.

If this is your first local install, or you have not done that already, extend your PATH to include the the local binaries. There are two ways to do that. The more convervative way

lets the system look through all binary directories first, and only looks into the local binary directory if a command was not found elsewhere. If you want software installed locally in your home directory to override system programs, you need the inverse the sort order.

You probably did that earlier already. You may want to add either command to your login sequence to have it run automatically.

If you do not want to alter your PATH variable, you don't have to. In this case, you cannot use the command  but must remember to use   instead.

Finally run:

or

respectively, in your cloned copy to set it up to work with Gerrit. It will probably ask you for your commit username. Then it will automatically install the commit-msg hook.

Fedora/CentOS
''Fedora Users: Replace  with. Since Fedora 22  has been considered deprecated and is replace with  .''

If, while using git-review, you see, you'll need to install  :

You may find that yum cannot find the git-review package -- in this case you can enable the REMI repository and try again.

OpenSUSE
Install (YaST) the, then

As of OpenSUSE 13.1, git-review is included in the main repository, so you can use,

Gentoo
Or use ebuild http://data.gpo.zugaina.org/openstack/dev-vcs/git-review/git-review-9999.ebuild

Unstable
If you are running the unstable branch of nixpkgs, git-review is available as a package. Install with:

$ nix-env -i python2.7-git-review

Older branches of nixpkgs
Install python and pip:

$ nix-env -i -A pythonPackages.pip

Add ~/.local/bin to your path:

$ export PATH=$PATH:~/.local/bin $ echo 'export PATH=$PATH:~/.local/bin' >> ~/.bashrc

Install git-review:

$ pip install git-review==1.21 --user $ pip install --upgrade setuptools $ pip install --upgrade distribute

FreeBSD
You can directly install git-review through ports.

Windows
Python is needed for git-review to function and pip is used for its installation:
 * Install Python or upgrade to most current version (either 3.4.2 or 2.7.8 depending on your python installation).
 * Important: Do not install Python in any directory with a space in its path as there is a pip bug (see ), use the default, e.g.
 * During the Python installation, manually select Add python.exe to Path
 * Otherwise, add your python scripts directory manually to the system path (Settings, Control panel, System, Advanced system settings, Environment variables, User variables, Path; e.g. ). Different directories in path are delimited by a semicolon ";" only - do not add any whitespace to path list.)
 * Python 3.4 has pip already installed. Only if you have an older version, install pip by following the instructions here.
 * Run Git Bash as Administrator (right click on icon for this option) and install git-review with the following command:
 * $ pip install git-review


 * To use, you have to be in a git clone directory that already contains a (possibly hidden)   configuration file, otherwise you will get the error message UnboundLocalError: local variable 'no_git_dir' referenced before assignment

Method 1
OS X comes with Python (for now) but not the installation programs supported by Git and git-review.


 * 1) Open Terminal and change to a directory you're comfortable downloading test Git packages to (such as Downloads)
 * 2) Download and install the OS X Installer for Git (for OS X 10.8 and earlier only, OS X 10.9 ships with Git pre-installed)
 * 3) Install pip (Note: Already included in some older versions of OS X):
 * 4) Update pip/setuptools (for OS X 10.7 and earlier only)
 * 5) Install git-review:

If you get the error, you may want to try nuking the pre-installed Python (/Library/Python/), installing Python via homebrew , and re-installing setuptools and git-review.

If you get a  after a seemingly successful installation, do not reinstall over the existing installation, but uninstall git-review and redo

Method 2
Works on OS X 10.11 El Capitan:


 * 1) Install Homebrew
 * 2) Install git-review with

Setting up git-review
Follow the instructions in the Gerrit tutorial to configure git-review so that it uses "origin" as its default remote. This avoids confusion and conflicts between remotes named "gerrit" and "origin".

After cloning a repository, you need to set it up for using git-review. This will automatically happen the first time you try to submit a commit, but it's generally better to do it right after cloning.

This may ask you for your git username, if it's different from the shell username you're using.

Internally, this does the following:
 * checks whether accessing the remote repository works
 * if it doesn't, asks for a username and tries again
 * creates a remote called 'gerrit' that points to gerrit
 * installs the commit-msg hook

Troubleshooting for Windows
If this fails, you have a couple of options. The first is the use scp (secure copy) from within your local repository's directory, for each repository, before committing edits to it:

$ scp -P 29418 USERNAME@gerrit.wikimedia.org:hooks/commit-msg .git/hooks/commit-msg

The second is to try patching c:\Python27\Scripts\git-review to make git-review work properly:

If using Python 2.x and git-review 1.17 or earlier, use  instead of.

Another error encountered on Windows is: ...   (top_dir, git_dir) = git_directories ValueError: too many values to unpack (expected 2)

One solution to this is to change the return line of  to use splitlines rather than its normal split function. Split looks for any whitespace and will produce this error when the path to your source code directory contains a space. Splitlines looks for newline characters and will not produce this same error.

Submitting changes with git-review
Submitting changes with git review does not involve a lot of commands: $ git checkout -b mycoolfeature change files $ git commit -a $ git review

What happens when you submit a change
When you submit a change, git review does the following things:
 * it looks up which branch to push to (production or whatever) in the .gitreview file. If it can't find this information, it pushes to master
 * it figures out what "topic" to put on the revision (you can set the topic manually with )
 * if you're resubmitting a downloaded change, it will reuse the tag of the original change
 * if your commit summary contains a bug number like, the tag will be
 * otherwise, the tag will be the name of your local branch
 * it rebases your change against the HEAD of the branch you're pushing to (use  to skip this)
 * if you are submitting more than one change at once, or submitting a change that's based on another unmerged change, it will ask you whether you really meant to do that (use  to skip this)
 * it pushes the change for review

Downloading a change with git-review
When downloading a change from gerrit to review it or amend it, git-review offers an easier alternative to copypasting a magic incantation from the Gerrit web UI. All you need is the sequence number of the change in Gerrit, which you can find in the URL:. $ git review -d 2033 This will download the change, put it in a branch called  (if the change has no tag, the sequence number will be used instead), and switch to that branch.

If you want to amend the downloaded change continue with the following: git add git commit --amend git review -R -f
 * 1) Do your changes.
 * 1) Upload to gerrit:
 * 1) where -R prevents rebase, and -f finishes the created branch (deletes it).

Full feature branch workflow with git-review
you@yourmachine:~/puppet (production)$ git checkout -b mycoolfeature you@yourmachine:~/puppet (mycoolfeature)$ vi foobar you@yourmachine:~/puppet (mycoolfeature)$ git commit -a -m "Committing my cool feature" you@yourmachine:~/puppet (mycoolfeature)$ git review -f you@yourmachine:~/puppet (production)$ If the  flag is passed to git-review, it will try to submit the change, and if it succeeds it will switch back to the master branch (production in this case) and delete the feature branch.

Setting up a repository for git-remote
To tell git-remote where your repository is and what the name of the master branch is, you need to create a .gitreview file in the root of the repository, and commit it. The format is the following: The  and   fields are mandatory. The other fields are optional:  defaults to 29418 and   defaults to.

git-review complains "Cannot query patchset information"
git-review does not work correctly if git generates non-English output. You will see an error like this:

$ git review -d 62474 Cannot query patchset information The following command failed with exit code 255 "ssh -x -p None gerrit query --format=JSON --current-patch-set change:62474" --- Bad port ' None' ---

This is due to a bug in git-review.

To work around this on a Linux system, either apply the patch from the bug report above, or set up an alias that forces git to use English output. To do so, put this into your  or similar setup file:

alias git="LANG=C git"

git-review complains "Could not parse json query response: u'Verified'"
git-review version 1.18 has been reported to have issues when trying to review a change from Gerrit. You will see an error like this:

$ git review -d 76352 Could not parse json query response: u'Verified'

This seams to be due to a bug in git-review version 1.18 since version 1.12 and version 1.21 work correct.

To work around this on a Linux system, use another version like version 1.12 on Fedora or version 1.12, version 1.21 on Ubuntu (by downgrading or removing version 1.18 and installing the suitable rpm). Version 1.22 under fedora works also.

git-review complains "ConfigParser.NoSectionError: No section: 'updates'"
If this happens (T57732, fixed in newer git-review versions):

$ git review -s Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/local/bin/git-review", line 1196, in    main File "/usr/local/bin/git-review", line 1108, in main needs_update = latest_is_newer File "/usr/local/bin/git-review", line 179, in latest_is_newer if not configParser.getboolean("updates", "check"): File "/usr/lib/python2.7/ConfigParser.py", line 368, in getboolean v = self.get(section, option) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/ConfigParser.py", line 607, in get raise NoSectionError(section) ConfigParser.NoSectionError: No section: 'updates'

Adding something like this to ".gitreview" fixes the problem: