Our Latest Creation - Git Splainin
Git-Splainin is a simple Chrome Extension that helps you populate pull requests with a predefined template. If you don't already use a pull request template, I highly recommend taking a moment to read Pull Request Templates Make Code Review Easier by Justin Abrahms.
If you don't care about all the cool details and just want to install the extension and use it you can grab it here
Automating Pull Request Templates
At Iced Dev, we recently started using a template for all of our pull requests. When initially rolling this out, we realized that we might need to make frequent changes to the template to accommodate all of the internal feedback. This looked like it could cause annoying problems as everyone had their own way of filling forms and at least one other extension didn't play nicely with GitHub. We were worried that we would end up in a situation where people would be wondering if their PR template was out of date without a easy way to pull the latest from a single source of truth; forcing them to go check it against a file buried in our "Getting Started" repo. So Git-Splainin was born.
Git-Splainin is a simple Chrome Extension that does one thing, and does it well. In fact, if you're not on GitHub actively creating a pull request you wouldn't even know that you had it installed. However, once you go to create a new PR a small icon will appear, allowing you to fill the form with a single click or you can optionally have the form autofill when you land on a page.
The options were setup specifically to match our workflows, but we think that they will make your life easier too. When configuring the plugin initially, you can create your template by hand or just provide a url to load from, giving you the option of modifying the template before you save it. This allows you to publish your PR templates to GitHub (or anywhere else) and easily share them across your team.
Making it Open Source
Finally Git-Splainin is completely open source, and we feel that it provides a very good baseline to start with if you want to learn how to build a Chrome Extension using Webpack, ES2015, React and Flux. You can view the full repository as well as a detailed README that explains how to build it from the source on Github.
To get Git-Splainin you can: