Harmless Changes

Harmless changes is a simple bash script that helps ignore unneeded build steps if code changes are harmless. This utility can speed up CI build times! 🏎 💨

⚠️ NOTE: This code is currently untested. Tests are in progress!

Summary   Install   Use   Contributing   Thanks

Summary

CI build steps can test many things, but what if the Pull Request to a master branch contains only for changes to a repository's README or a slight change to an image? Harmless Changes checks if the only changes that were made within a Pull Request were for items that can be ignored in CI via a .ciingore file. CI build steps can be exited if the Harmless Changes script finds that only files within the .ciignore file were ignored.

Install

Clone:

git clone git@github.com:dollarshaveclub/harmless-changes.git

NPM

npm i harmless-changes --save-dev

Use

The documentation below provides steps to using harmless changes

Make a .ciignore

The .ciignore file is used to ingore certain files during the ci (build) process

In a terminal:

touch .ciignore

Check if changes are harmless

With CI build steps in CircleCI or Travis, configure CI to work according to whether harmless exits with a 1 or 0.

Add a script to run harmless changes, in example:

if npx harmless-changes; then
  exit 0
 fi
 
# or  
# if an older version of NPM is being used 
if ./node_modules/.bin/harmless-changes; then
 exit 0
fi
 
# or, finally 
# if Harmless Changes has not been installed with NPM (the code below is an assumed path) 
if ./harmless-changes.sh; then
  exit 0
fi

CI will/can now exit if only harmless changes were made.

Contributing

Please contribute to Harmless Changes by filing an issue,responding to issues, or reaching out socially—etc.

Harmless Changes is a utility. It may not be beneficial to many repositories if builds are simple. However, as test grow, and project builds become more complex, Harmless Changes is a simple tool that can save lots of time!

Thanks

This utility was thought up and made for Dollar Shave Club by Brian Gonzalez and Jon Ong while the team was implementing continuous integration. Along with CircleCi, ES Check, gh-automerge, Greenkeeper, Jest and Mocha, Harmless Changes is a utility that Dollar Shave Club has used to save the company many engineer hours per week with fast builds.