branch-diff

A tool to list print the commits on one git branch that are not on another using loose comparison

Usage

$ branch-diff [--format=<format>] [--group] [--reverse] [--patch-only] base-branch comparison-branch

A commit is considered to be in the comparison-branch but not in the base-branch if:

• the commit sha is identical, or
• the commit summary is identical and the commit description is identical and a PR-URL exists in the metadata and is identical (in the description but split out by commit-stream)

The output is the same as changelog-maker. The default simple format suits console output; use --format=markdown for Markdown.

The commit list is very close to running:

$ git log main..next

But the comparison isn't quite as strict, generally leading to a shorter list of commits.

Options

• --version or -v: Only prints branch-diff's package.json version.
• --group or -g: Group commits by prefix, this uses the part of the commit summary that is usually used in Node.js core to indicate subsystem for example. Groups are made up of numbers, letters, , and -, followed by a :.
• --exclude-label: Exclude any commits from the list that come from a GitHub pull request with the given label. Multiple --exclude-label options may be provided, they will also be split by ,. e.g. --exclude-label=semver-major,meta.
• --require-label: Only include commits in the list that come from a GitHub pull request with the given label. Multiple --require-label options may be provided, they will also be split by ,. e.g. --require-label=test,doc.
• --patch-only: An alias for --exclude-label=semver-major,semver-minor.
• --format: Dictates what formatting the output will have. Possible options are: simple, markdown, plaintext, messageonly and sha. The default is to print a simple output suitable for stdout. An unknown format is an error.
  • simple: Don't print full markdown output, good for console printing without the additional fluff.
  • sha: Print only the 10-character truncated commit hashes. Good for piping though additional tooling, such as xargs git cherry-pick for applying commits.
  • plaintext: A very simple form, without commit details, implies --group.
  • markdown: A Markdown formatted from, with links and proper escaping.
  • messageonly: Only the commit message, implies --group.
• --filter-release: Exclude Node-style release commits from the list. e.g. Working on v1.0.0 or 2015-10-21 Version 2.0.0.
• --reverse: Reverse the results, this is especially useful when piping output to xargs.
• --commit-url:A URL template which will be used to generate commit URLs for a repository not hosted in GitHub. {ref} is the placeholder that will be replaced with the commit, i.e. --commit-url=https://gitlab.com/myUser/myRepo/commit/{ref}. {ghUser} and {ghRepo} are available if they can be derived from package.json (Gitlab and Bitbucket URLs should be understood in package.json).
• --find-matching-prs: Use the GitHub API to find the pull requests that match commits that don't have PR-URL metadata in their message text.
• --quiet or -q: Do not print to stdout.
• --user: Override the auto-detected GitHub user/org derived from package.json
• --repo: Override the auto-detected GitHub repository name derived from package.json

Unknown options are an error. The --sha, --plaintext, --markdown and --simple shorthands were removed in v4; use --format=<format>.

License

branch-diff is Copyright (c) 2015 Rod Vagg @rvagg and licenced under the MIT licence. All rights not explicitly granted in the MIT license are reserved. See the included LICENSE.md file for more details.