fetchbranches

Fetch branches tool

Overview

The fetch branches tool is used to perform a fetch of a branch locally to test and verify the changes before merging on master. The fetch branches tool is designed to run in Semaphore and it will only accept GitHub pull requests. The fetch branches tool uses Semaphore's environment variables ("PULL_REQUEST_NUMBER" and "SEMAPHORE_REPO_SLUG") to retrieve information like the pull request number and the name of the owner and the repository.

Validation Tags

When raising a pull request, the commit message must have a Signed-off-by entry. A validation tag should be part of the commit message or as a general comment in the pull request in order to run the fetch branches tool. The following validation tags are accepted by the fetch branches tool:

1. branch_shim:URL
2. branch_tests:URL
3. branch_proxy:URL
4. branch_runtime:URL
5. branch_hyperstar:URL

As we can see from the validation tags, after the word branch_, we have the name of the current repositories (shim, tests, proxy, runtime and hyperstart). After branch_xxx, a colon (:) is placed as a separation and after an URL should be placed.

The URL in the validation tags represents the URL of the branch. It should always start with https:// or http:// and it should be placed after branch_xxx:.

Here is an example of a validation tag: branch_tests:https://github.com/GabyCT/tests/tree/topic/readmefetchtool

The fetch branches tool will only retrieve the comments of the author of the pull request. The validation tag can only be replaced by the author of the pull request. This can be done by changing the validation tag in the original commit message or pull request's comments. In case that the author of the pull request introduces two or more validation tags for the same repository (i.e. branch_tests:URL, branch_tests:URL2) the fetch branches will only consider the last validation tag inserted by the author of the pull request.

Running the fetch branches tool

The fetch branches tool will build and run as part of the .ci/setup.sh.