ship-strategy

The ship-strategy setting defines how git town ship merges finished feature branches into the main branch.

options

api

When using the "api" ship-strategy, git town ship presses the "merge" button for the proposal in the web UI of your code hosting platform via an API call.

You need to configure an API token in the setup assistant for this to work.

api is the default value because it does exactly what you normally do manually.

fast-forward

The fast-forward ship strategy prevents false merge conflicts when using stacked changes. It merges the branch to ship into its parent (typically the main branch) by running git merge --ff-only and then pushes the new commits on the parent branch to origin. This way the parent branch contains the exact same commits as the branch that has just been shipped.

For details why this is needed check out this GitHub documentation.

This works on GitHub even if your main branch is protected as long as the associated proposal is green and has been approved! GitHub recognizes that the commits you push have already been tested and approved and allows them to be pushed. For more information, see this StackOverflow answer.

A limitation of the fast-forward ship strategy is that your feature branch must be up to date, i.e. the main branch must not have received additional commits since you last synced your feature branch.

squash-merge

When set to squash-merge, git town ship merges the feature branch to ship in your local Git repository. While doing so it squashes all commits on the feature branch into a single commit and lets you edit the commit message.

change this setting

The best way to change this setting is via the setup assistant.

config file

Set the ship-strategy in the config file:

ship.strategy = "api"

or

[ship]
strategy = "api"

Git metadata

To manually configure the ship-strategy in Git metadata, run:

git config [--global] git-town.ship-strategy <api|squash-merge>

The optional --global flag applies this setting to all Git repositories on your machine. Without it, the setting applies only to the current repository.