Developer Morning Ritual

As part of my morning ritual I need to update all of my source control repositories so that I have the latest code to start the day. For the record, I’m using Mercurial (hg).

For the longest time I was going through each repository using TortoiseHg Workbench and doing a manual hg pull using the GUI. The amount of repositories has gotten to a ridiculous number so I decided I would automate the process.

Yay, Powershell!

Given that I am working on Windows I decided to use Powershell, which I feel is very powerful and exactly what we (Windows developers) needed in a command line.

Teh Codez

Cls
Write-Host "Searching for repositories to update..."
Write-Host

$dirs = Get-ChildItem | where {$_.PsIsContainer} | where { Get-ChildItem $_ -filter ".hg" }

foreach ($dir in $dirs)
{
    Start-Job -Name HgUpdate$dir -ArgumentList @($dir.FullName) -ScriptBlock {
        pushd $args[0]
        hg pull --update
    } | Out-Null
    "Created job for repository: " + $dir
}

Cls
Write-Host "Waiting for jobs to complete..."
Wait-Job HgUpdate* | Out-Null

Cls
Receive-Job HgUpdate*
Write-Host
Write-Host "All jobs completed."
Write-Host "Press any key to continue..."
$host.UI.RawUI.ReadKey("NoEcho,IncludeKeyDown") | Out-Null

There’s not a lot going on here:

1. Get all the directories in the same directory as the script that contain Hg repositories
2. Start a job to update each repository with a unique name (HgUpdate plus the name of the directory)
3. Wait for all the jobs to complete
4. Print the result of all the jobs to the screen
5. Wait for user input

The cool thing happening in this script is that all the repositories will be pulled asyncronously using the Start-Job command. This way we don’t have to wait for one to finish before the next one can start. The result is a morning filled with the latest codez for no effort :)

What About Git?

Using minimal changes you should be able to get this script working with Git. I haven’t provided a Git version because I don’t need it, and you smart developers should be able to make the changes yourself. Changing the -filter to look for a Git repository and the hg pull –update line to get the latest Git changes should do it. If you do it, let me know!