Adopt a Branch

Aviator CLI needs to maintain the metadata for branches so that it can remember the parent-child relationships among them. If you create branches with av stack branch, the metadata is created upon branch creation. You can attach the metadata for branches that are created with git branch.

Create a repository

We will use an example repository from https://github.com/octocat/hello-world. Clone it and initialize the Aviator CLI.

$ git clone https://github.com/octocat/hello-world
Cloning into 'hello-world'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 13, done.
remote: Total 13 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 13
Receiving objects: 100% (13/13), done.
$ cd hello-world
$ av init
Successfully initialized repository for use with av!

Creating a branch outside of av

Instead of using av stack branch, we use a normal Git command to create a branch and a commit.

$ git switch --create mytopic
Switched to a new branch 'mytopic'
$ git commit --allow-empty --message="New commit"
[mytopic d384683] New commit

As we can see, the newly created branch mytopic is not tracked in av stack tree, but it's shown in git branch.

$ av stack tree
master
$ git branch -vv
  master  7fd1a60 [origin/master] Merge pull request #6 from Spaceghost/patch-1
* mytopic d384683 New commit

Adopting a branch with av stack sync

By running av stack sync specifying the parent branch (in this case master) adds metadata for the current branch mytopic. Now, if you run av stack tree, you can see that mytopic is correctly recognized as a child of master.

$ av stack sync --parent master
  - Adopting a branch mytopic to Av
  - Re-parenting branch mytopic onto master
Synchronizing branch mytopic...
  - fetching latest pull request information for mytopic
      - this branch does not have an open pull request (create one with av pr create or av stack submit)
  - branch is a stack root, nothing to do (run av stack sync --trunk to sync against the latest commit in master)
$ av stack tree
master
    * mytopic (not pushed)