Welcome to GitDepend’s documentation!¶

Solves the problem of working with multiple git repositories where lower level repositories produce nuget packages that are consumed by other repositories.

Why do I need GitDepend?¶

I work for a company that produces a lot of in-house nuget packages. Originally we tried maintaining the version of these packages manually. If you’ve ever tried doing that on a large scale you realize that it quickly gets unmanageable. It’s easy to make mistakes with your versioning. It’s easy to forget to bump the version. In short, versioning is something that should really be automated.

GitVersion to the rescue! With GitVersion we could just write code, and our packages magically version themselves correctly. BUT, there was still a big problem. We didn’t like lower level packages having to bump their version just because another package had to change. GitVersion assumes the same version for the entire repository. So, if you need a unique version so that your code can stabalize on a version you need to split it into another git repository.

We started doing this... a LOT. Before we knew it the setup process to get our full process building involved checking out multiple repositories. Making sure that each one was on the appropriate branch for what we were doing, and writing a complicated build script that lived in the upper most repository to build all other repositories. As we added new repositories that build script was constantly changing, and getting more complicated. We needed a solution that made it easy to chain repositories together. Thus GitDepend was born.

Installing GitDepend.CommandLine¶

GitDepend is available on nuget.org

Install-Package GitDepend.CommandLine

Installing GitDepend.Portable¶

GitDepend is available on chocolatey.org

choco install GitDepend.Portable

Command Line Arguments¶

config    Displays the full configuration file

init      Assists you in creating a GitDepend.json

clone     Recursively clones all dependencies

update    Recursively builds all dependencies, and updates the current
          project to the newly built artifacts.

help      Display this help screen.

Usage Example¶

In the root of your repository you will include a GitDepend.json file

{
  "build": {
    "script": "make.bat"
  },
  "packages": {
    "dir": "artifacts/NuGet/Debug"
  },
  "dependencies": [
    {
      "name": "Lib1",
      "url": "git@github.com:kjjuno/Lib1.git",
      "dir": "../Lib1",
      "branch": "develop"
    }
  ]
}

Normally if you are working in an upper level repository you should just be able to run the build script and rely on nuget packages. However, when you have changed code in a lower level repository you will need to have those changes cascade up the chain. This is where GitDepend shines. Run the following command

GitDepend.exe update

This will follow the chain of GitDepend.json files. The following things will happen

Check out the dependency if it has not been checked out.
Ensure that the repository is on the correct branch.
update all dependencies (this is a recursive step)
consume the latest nuget packages produced by dependency repositories.

At this point the upper level repository should be all up to date, targetting the latest nuget packages and be ready to build.

Try it out!¶

Take a look at some example projects and try it out for yourself.

Lib1
Lib2

Lib2 depends on Lib1

Clone Lib2

git clone git@github.com:kjjuno/Lib2.git

from the root of Lib2 run

make.bat update

This will clone and build all dependencies

build it with

make.bat

Now, make a change in Lib1 and commit that change.

make.bat update