As projects grow patterns that worked early on break and we need to change things to make the project easier to work with, and more welcoming to new developers.
git
Before you start mucking up a project with wild commands at the terminal check that you have a super clean git status. We may make some mistakes and need a way to undo 100's files and git makes it really easy if you start with a clean history.
git status
If we are ready to begin work we should see a response like this.
On branch main
nothing to commit, working tree clean
It would also be wise to do this inside of a branch. The minute you try to do something wild in your working branch someone will walk by and ask you to do a five-minute task, but your deep in refactoring and haven't left yourself a clean way back.
git branch my-big-refactor
grepr
Time for the meat of this refactor replacing text across our project. I often will pop this bash function into my terminal session and tweak it as needed. This function is called grepr for grep then replace. It will recursively search for a given pattern inside your working directory, then use sed to replace that pattern with another.
grepr(){grep-iRl"$1" | xargs sed-i"s/$1/$2/g"}
If your pattern contains / characters such as for URLs you can swap the /'s in the sed command for |'s.
grepr(){grep-iRl"$1" | xargs sed-i"s|$1|$2|g"}
You can find this function and more of my bash notes.
I recently flattened this blog so blogs are under the top-level rather than under /blog and I used this technique to swap internal links to the new format.
After running the replace command the first thing I want to see is everything that changed. Looking at git diff will highlight exactly what changed since our last commit.
git diff
Work in small steps
If you're happy with the results commit them now. It's best to do these commands that have a large effect on the entire project in small steps.
git add .
git commit -m"moved routes from /blog to /"
Working in small steps gives us an easy way to undo steps that may have been a mistake before it's too late.
I used the technique from this post to switch master to main on my blog.
git reset
How I do Mass Undo
be careful work from a branch, make sure you started clean
Let's say I wanted to change every occurrence of one variable name to another.
Lets try to replace replace pandas.CSVDataSet with pandas.ParquetDataSet.
Upon inspection of the git diff we notice that there was an unintentional change to the docs/standard-storage.md file. To revert the entire change we can run.
note These resets are irreversible. Make sure that you started with a clean git status and you are confident that you didn't have any work on your machine, not in the remote repo.
match the remote and wipe out any changes
git reset --hard origin/main
match our last commit
git reset --hard HEAD
agr
I have an alternative version that I occasionally use as well that utilizes the silver searcher ag. It does a great job at following your .gitignore rules with no fuss, and can filter down to file extensions simply with flags like --md
agr(){ag -l"$1" | xargs sed-i"s/$1/$2/g"}
git clean
how I remove untracked files
Sometimes our refactoring requires moving files around. If we want to undo steps like this git will not clean up untracked files.
-x can be a bit dangerous, be careful with it. You can lose significant time by wiping out a node_modules, venv, or credentials.
git checkout
How I undo single files
If our command was mostly successful, but just a few extra files were touched I will manually revert them with git checkout <filename>
git checkout conf/base/supply-catalog.yml
git checkout --
How I undo an entire directory
Sometimes we need to undo an entire directory. This command will undo changes to all of the tracked files in the repo.
git checkout -- /src/pages/blog
gitui
I really love using gitui as a handy terminal interface to browse logs, diffs, and commit a few files at a time. It starts up crazy fast and is very intuitive to navigate through diffs of changes like this one file at a time if the git diff gets too overwhelming.
Waylon Walker
