Display a breadcrumb in proposals

Git Town can render a visual breadcrumb in proposals that shows where the current branch sits within its stack. This makes stacked changes explicit and easier to review.

These breadcrumbs are kept up to date automatically when you:

• propose a branch
• sync branches
• ship a branch
• delete a branch
• prepend a branch
• detach a branch
• change the parent of a branch
• merge branches
• swap branches

There are two ways to maintain breadcrumbs. You only need to enable one of them.

Use the Git Town executable

The Git Town CLI can create and update breadcrumbs. This approach works across all supported forges and doesn’t require any CI or workflow changes. Breadcrumbs only get updated if branch changes happen through the Git Town CLI.

To enable this behavior, set proposal-breadcrumb to one of the following values:

• branches to display breadcrumbs for all branches
• stacks to display breadcrumbs only for stacks that contain more than one branch
• none to not display breadcrumbs

You can also set proposal-breadcrumb-direction:

• down prints the breadcrumb from the root down
• up prints the breadcrumb from the root up

Use the GitHub action

If your team standardizes on Git Town and uses GitHub, you can set up the Git Town GitHub action to automatically add and update breadcrumbs on all pull requests. This offloads the update workload to CI and ensures breadcrumbs get updated even when changes are made outside the local Git Town CLI.

To enable this behavior, set up the GitHub Action.