MISC-TN-028: GitLab-based workflow

Info Box

History

Version	Date	Notes
1.0.0	August 2023	First public release

Introduction

DAVE Embedded Systems uses GitLab as the primary source code management platform. This Technical Note describes the typical GitLab-based workflow we use and that our partners are strongly encouraged to adopt as well.

Essential steps of the workflow

We will show the steps the workflow is composed of by using a very simple example. To this end, we created an ad hoc empty repository, named test0. The goal is to write the first release of the code by following the recommended workflow.

Once the repository is created, we create an issue. Every implementation should start with this step: first of all, create an issue!

In this case, we call the issue "First release" as shown by the following picture:

Then, we create a merge request associated with the issue. We instruct GitLab to automatically create a branch associated with this issue as well. The branch will be called 1-first-release and its source branch is main. This means then when the merge request is accepted, the new code in the branch 1-first-release will be merged into the branch main.

Please note that the merge options are so that the branch will be deleted when the merge request is accepted. This usually makes sense because we don't need to keep the branch we the job is done. If you are asking, don't worry: although the branch will be deleted, commits will not be lost. Therefore, the history of changes will be preserved.

On GitLab side everything is in place, so we can work on our local host to write our code. For the sake of simplicity, we will just edit one file, README.md.

Of course, the first step consists of cloning the repository:

$ git clone git@gitlab.com:DAVEEmbeddedSystems/test/test0.git
Cloning into 'test0'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 3, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (3/3), done.
remote: Total 3 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0
Receiving objects: 100% (3/3), done.

Thea, we checkout the branch named 1-first-release:

$ cd test0/
/test0$ git branch -a
* master
  remotes/origin/1-first-release
  remotes/origin/HEAD -> origin/master
  remotes/origin/master
/test0$ git checkout 1-first-release 
Branch '1-first-release' set up to track remote branch '1-first-release' from 'origin'.
Switched to a new branch '1-first-release'
/test0$ ll
total 12
drwxrwxr-x 3 llandre llandre 4096 ago 16 22:06 ./
drwxrwxr-x 3 llandre llandre 4096 ago 16 22:06 ../
drwxrwxr-x 8 llandre llandre 4096 ago 16 22:07 .git/
-rw-rw-r-- 1 llandre llandre    0 ago 16 22:06 README.md

We edit the README.md file with our favorite editor, then we commit our changes and push them to the remote repository:

/test0$ git diff
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
index e69de29..901353b 100644
--- a/README.md
+++ b/README.md
@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+This is the first release.
/test0$ git add README.md 
/test0$ git commit -m "Change README.md"
[1-first-release ce31afa] Change README.md
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)
/test0$ git push
Enumerating objects: 5, done.
Counting objects: 100% (5/5), done.
Writing objects: 100% (3/3), 277 bytes | 277.00 KiB/s, done.
Total 3 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0
remote: 
remote: View merge request for 1-first-release:
remote:   https://gitlab.com/DAVEEmbeddedSystems/test/test0/-/merge_requests/1
remote: 
To gitlab.com:DAVEEmbeddedSystems/test/test0.git
   e382410..ce31afa  1-first-release -> 1-first-release

We can now move back to GitLab-side and close the merge request.