GrumPHP is yet another quality control tool for PHP. But unlike a million other – PHPUnit, PHP CodeSniffer, and the like – this one is more of a tying knot. GrumPHP integrates via git hooks. It runs one more of the other tools, making sure that the changes you are committing are up to the par.
The support for other tools is excellent. You’ll find anything from the basic unit tests and coding style checks to commit message formatting and content, Robo tasks, and even custom shell scripts.
I have only recently discovered the concept of monorepos. It does sound interesting and I am yet to try it out, or, at least, dig deeper into the subject. But then, there are people who have strong opinions against them, and I the reasoning makes all the sense to me. Here’s a nice one: Monorepos: Please don’t!
The evolution goes on. Now that we’ve kind of sorted out most of our infrastructure, development tools, flows and processes, I guess, it’s time to look deeper into the things we’ve had for a while and reiterate over them.
Recently, I’m seeing a lot of blog posts on articles on how to write good commit messages. Sure, we’ve had these for a while. But lately things get a little bit more serious.
Here’s one (in Russian) that I’ve read recently. Here’s another one (in English) that shares some of the concepts and suggestions.
What are they saying? Well, “write better commit messages”, obviously. But there are a couple of specific bits which I found interesting. They are:
For the skeptics among you, I slightly share your feeling. It does seem like a bit too much overhead. But as someone who works with an ever-growing team on a large number of projects, I think there is a place for it. It’ll take a while to integrate, update the process, and enforce the discipline, but I think it’s well worth it. At the very least, it deserves a try.
Awesome git addons is yet another one of those curated awesome lists. This time it’s for git version control tool. And once again, it’s mind blowing.
Git itself is a very flexible and powerful tool. But it truly amazing how far some people take it. In the list you can find anything from aliases for complex commands, to full-featured integrations with GitHub, git flow process, deployment tools, and much more.
There’s a lot of confusion between git merge and git rebase even among seasoned users of git. “An Introduction to Git Merge and Git Rebase: What They Do and When to Use Them” is a great article explaining the pros and cons of each, and when and why using each of this is better.
While I understand it a lot better now, I still much prefer the merge approach. It’s simpler and less dangerous, and maintains the full history. This might get noisy at times, but works as a last resort when trying to understand what was going through the developer’s head when he was working on a piece of code.