I’ve been working on a CI trigger that runs particular jobs depending on which project changed. The tricky aspect is we have a single git repository. So given a commit hash, we want to determine which projects to trigger builds for.
This is easy for a commit with a single parent – git diff-tree can show what changed simply by passing that commit. A merge commit is a little more work. Here is the one liner that will work for both regular and merge commits:
git rev-list $commit^1..$commit | git diff-tree --stdin --no-commit-id --name-only | sort | uniq
If the root of your git repo looks like this:
> ls project1 project2 project3
You’ll get an output like:
project2 project3
When project2 and project3 were changed by the $commit.
rev-list $commit^1..$commit produces all commits reachable by $commitexcluding those reachable by its first parent. So for a regular commit, you get the changes introduced by that commit only. For a merge commit, you get all the changes that were merged in from the other branch.
You can customize the list displayed by passing additional arguments to git diff-tree. For instance, -r will recursively list all files changed.
James Ravn 