10_working_with_git.rst

Working with Git

In this document you can learn basics of how you should use Git in Airflow project. It explains branching model and stresses that we are using rebase workflow. It also explains how to sync your fork with the main repository.

The outline for this document in GitHub is available at top-right corner button (with 3-dots and 3 lines).

Airflow Git Branches

All new development in Airflow happens in the main branch. All PRs should target that branch.

We also have a v2-*-test branches that are used to test 2.*.x series of Airflow and where maintainers cherry-pick selected commits from the main branch.

Cherry-picking is done with the -x flag.

The v2-*-test branch might be broken at times during testing. Expect force-pushes there so maintainers should coordinate between themselves on who is working on the v2-*-test branch - usually these are developers with the release manager permissions.

The v2-*-stable branch is rather stable - there are minimum changes coming from approved PRs that passed the tests. This means that the branch is rather, well, "stable".

Once the v2-*-test branch stabilizes, the v2-*-stable branch is synchronized with v2-*-test. The v2-*-stable branches are used to release 2.*.x releases.

The general approach is that cherry-picking a commit that has already had a PR and unit tests run against main is done to v2-*-test branches, but PRs from contributors towards 2.0 should target v2-*-stable branches.

The v2-*-test branches and v2-*-stable ones are merged just before the release and that's the time when they converge.

The production images are released in DockerHub from:

• main branch for development
• 2.*.*, 2.*.*rc* releases from the v2-*-stable branch when we prepare release candidates and final releases.

How to sync your fork

When you have your fork, you should periodically synchronize the main of your fork with the Apache Airflow main. In order to do that you can git pull --rebase to your local git repository from apache remote and push the main (often with --force to your fork). There is also an easy way to sync your fork in GitHub's web UI with the Fetch upstream feature.

This will force-push the main branch from apache/airflow to the main branch in your fork. Note that in case you modified the main in your fork, you might loose those changes.

How to rebase PR

A lot of people are unfamiliar with the rebase workflow in Git, but we think it is an excellent workflow, providing a better alternative to the merge workflow. We've therefore written a short guide for those who would like to learn it.

As of February 2022, GitHub introduced the capability of "Update with Rebase" which make it easy to perform rebase straight in the GitHub UI, so in cases when there are no conflicts, rebasing to latest version of main can be done very easily following the instructions in the GitHub blog

However, when you have conflicts, sometimes you will have to perform rebase manually, and resolve the conflicts, and remainder of the section describes how to approach it.

As opposed to the merge workflow, the rebase workflow allows us to clearly separate your changes from the changes of others. It puts the responsibility of rebasing on the author of the change. It also produces a "single-line" series of commits on the main branch. This makes it easier to understand what was going on and to find reasons for problems (it is especially useful for "bisecting" when looking for a commit that introduced some bugs).

First of all, we suggest you read about the rebase workflow here: Merging vs. rebasing. This is an excellent article that describes all the ins/outs of the rebase workflow. I recommend keeping it for future reference.

The goal of rebasing your PR on top of apache/main is to "transplant" your change on top of the latest changes that are merged by others. It also allows you to fix all the conflicts that arise as a result of other people changing the same files as you and merging the changes to apache/main.

Here is how rebase looks in practice (you can find a summary below these detailed steps):

1. You first need to add the Apache project remote to your git repository. This is only necessary once, so if it's not the first time you are following this tutorial you can skip this step. In this example, we will be adding the remote as "apache" so you can refer to it easily:

• If you use ssh: git remote add apache [email protected]:apache/airflow.git
• If you use https: git remote add apache https://github.com/apache/airflow.git

2. You then need to make sure that you have the latest main fetched from the apache repository. You can do this via:

   git fetch apache (to fetch apache remote)

   git fetch --all (to fetch all remotes)

3. Assuming that your feature is in a branch in your repository called my-branch you can easily check what is the base commit you should rebase from by:

   git merge-base my-branch apache/main

   This will print the HASH of the base commit which you should use to rebase your feature from. For example: 5abce471e0690c6b8d06ca25685b0845c5fd270f. Copy that HASH and go to the next step.

   Optionally, if you want better control you can also find this commit hash manually.

   Run:

   git log

   And find the first commit that you DO NOT want to "transplant".

   Performing:

   git rebase HASH

   Will "transplant" all commits after the commit with the HASH.

4. Providing that you weren't already working on your branch, check out your feature branch locally via:

   git checkout my-branch

5. Rebase:

   git rebase HASH --onto apache/main

   For example:

   git rebase 5abce471e0690c6b8d06ca25685b0845c5fd270f --onto apache/main

6. If you have no conflicts - that's cool. You rebased. You can now run git push --force-with-lease to push your changes to your repository. That should trigger the build in our CI if you have a Pull Request (PR) opened already.

7. While rebasing you might have conflicts. Read carefully what git tells you when it prints information about the conflicts. You need to solve the conflicts manually. This is sometimes the most difficult part and requires deliberately correcting your code and looking at what has changed since you developed your changes.

   There are various tools that can help you with this. You can use:

   git mergetool

   You can configure different merge tools with it. You can also use IntelliJ/PyCharm's excellent merge tool. When you open a project in PyCharm which has conflicts, you can go to VCS > Git > Resolve Conflicts and there you have a very intuitive and helpful merge tool. For more information, see Resolve conflicts.

8. After you've solved your conflict run:

   git rebase --continue

   And go either to point 6. or 7, depending on whether you have more commits that cause conflicts in your PR (rebasing applies each commit from your PR one-by-one).

Summary

Useful when you understand the flow but don't remember the steps and want a quick reference.

git fetch --all git merge-base my-branch apache/main git checkout my-branch git rebase HASH --onto apache/main git push --force-with-lease

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Now, once you know it all you can read more about how Airflow repository is a monorepo containing both airflow package and more than 80 provider packages and how to develop providers.