ship-strategy

This 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 forge 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.

always-merge

The always-merge ship strategy creates a merge commit via git merge --no-ff.

This strategy allows visually grouping related feature commits together which may aid in understanding project history in certain situations.

It is not generally recommended to revert merge commits, so git town undo will not create a merge reversal commit if the merge commit has been pushed already. See howto/revert-a-faulty-merge.adoc in the official Git documentation for more information.

fast-forward

The fast-forward ship strategy prevents false merge conflicts when using stacked changes and allows to Ship several branches in a stack without unnecessary CI runs. It runs git merge –ff-only which fast-forwards the parent branch to contain the commits of the branch to ship and then pushes the new commits on the parent branch to the development remote. 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.

config file

Set the ship strategy in the config file:

[ship]
strategy = "api"

Git metadata

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

git config [--global] git-town.ship-strategy <always-merge|api|fast-forward|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.

environment variable

You can configure the ship strategy by setting the GIT_TOWN_SHIP_STRATEGY environment variable.