Dr Nic

For my Rails and RubyGem projects I’ll run multiple branches plus a trunk. The trunk represents the live, public/production code, and the branches represent new features being developed [1]. So if I’m working on a branch for a feature, and I open a new terminal shell, THAT’s the working folder I want to go to, not the trunk, nor any other branch. Just that one.

Even for small gems and projects where I have no branches, just a trunk, I want quick ways to get to the working folder. [2] You know, the branch I was just working on two seconds ago.

So, if I have a project (rails app or gem) called wizzo, and I’ve checked out the trunk and some branches into a common folder:

• /path/to/wizzo —trunk
• /path/to/wizzo_feature1 —branch for feature1 (Last touched)
• /path/to/wizzo_feature2 —branch for feature2

OR, if I checkout the trunk and all branches into one folder:

• /path/to/wizzo/trunk —trunk
• /path/to/wizzo/branches/feature1 —branch for feature1 (Last touched)
• /path/to/wizzo/branches/feature2 —branch for feature2

I want an alias wizzo to take me to /path/to/wizzo/branches/feature1 if that is where I’m working at the moemnt.

If you want this too, do the following:

$ sudo gem install latest_branch

And for each folder that contains your projects, add the following to your .profile:

alias_all_projects –path=~/Documents/rails_apps/
. ~/.project_aliases

And this will generate many wonderful, dynamic aliases for you.

See the latest_branch website for the ins-and-outs, and its helper app latest_branch.

[1] At work - a non-ruby/rails, billing system on CVS - we do it differently. The trunk is for development of all new features, and production releases are tagged, and also branched for critical fixes. But the above code would be useful for both situations.

[2] Lucky zsh shell users can do fancy stuff like map folders to ~proj folders, and use autocomplete, such that cd ~p/t might go to ../proj/trunk. Neat.