9 Development Workflow Upgrades You Should Know About

Every once in a while I run into a tool or plugin so useful I can’t not add it to my arsenal. I usually shout out tweets and try to spread the word that way, but this time I believe I’ve got such a neat (and somewhat random) collection of productivity boosting entries, they deserve a collective article.

Here are 9 new upgrades to your development workflow:

1. git-fresh

git-fresh “keeps your repo fresh”. It offers a super handy set of shortcuts for some very useful git commands and combinations - it’ll prune remote branches, rebase, do merges or resets of your workspace, even stash changes effectively so you can easily push or switch branches without committing the latest changes.

It only supports Linux and OS X but since we’re big on Homestead Improved anyway, it’s all Linux for us. In fact, we’re thinking about adding this to the default Homestead Improved installation, so it’s available out of the box. Thoughts?

2. git-extras

git-extras, owned by the mythical TJ Holowaychuk, similarly extends Git’s functionality with incredibly useful additional commands. It’s a pretty old addon, but I’ve only just discovered it and I’m sure there are more of you who might find it rather handy. Examples of new commands include:

• git setup: initializes a repo and does the first commit of present files for you. A more “bootstrappy” start of a repo, in essence.
• git ignore: a command line “ignore” so you can add files to .gitignore without leaving the terminal or entering a text editor
• git summary: provides a neat summary of the repo, including its age, its most active contributors, and more
• git undo: this one is a real lifesaver - it undoes the last commit, but still keeps the changes as uncommitted so you can safely call git reset --hard to discard them once you inspect the condition of the repo with git status
• git changelog: automatically creates and populates a changelog file with a MarkDown list of all the commit messages since the last tag was created in the repo.
• git release x.y.z: a shortcut for creating a release. This invokes a pre-release hook (for builds/tests), creates a release tag of the given version, pushes the tags and the repo to the remote, and everything else you might do on release day
• git fork: command line forking!
• git squash: easier squashing of commits!

See full list here.

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by Bruno Skvorc via SitePoint