Week 5: Refactoring

Introduction

This week I was tasked with adding 3 small changes on my release 0.1 project, all on separate commits. Then, I would use git rebase to squash all the commits into one commit, merging it with the main branch. Compared to other labs I found this one to be simpler and less time consuming since I wasn't adding anything major to my project, and the only thing I had to do was combine them into one commit.

Getting started

To get started, I pulled the most recent changes to the main branch and created a new branch called "refactoring". While working on these changes, I made sure to add a commit after each one, instead of working on all the changes in the same commit.

The changes

My first change was actually to fix a bug I notice in my code. The last lab was to add the TOML file functionality. If I tried to run the code with a TOML file that had the api key as undefined, eg.

api =

The program would error out. I fixed this so now it simply provides a warning message, and continues with whatever api key the user provided as an environment variable instead.

The second change was another bug fix, I noticed that if the user simply runs the program without any extra arguments, eg.

node index.js

Nothing would print out. But it's supposed to print a welcome message. I figured out that since I added proper exit conditions to the code, it would exit before it could ever reach the check. To fix this, I just moved the check to the top of the code instead of the bottom.

The last change I added was a simple variable rename. In both files that are used to run the program, a variable named "modelChange" was defined to keep track of which model the AI would use. Since the user is not always changing the default model, I thought it would provide more clarity if I renamed this to "modelNumber". Every instance of modelChange was renamed to modelNumber.

Rebasing

Once I committed all my changes, it was time for the rebase. I ran the interactive rebase command:

git rebase main -i

And I opened the interactive rebase in my editor. I had to refresh on my unix commands a little (like pressing I to go into insert mode and typing :wq to save) but once I did I made sure the last 2 commits were squashed into the first commit. After saving this rebase, I did an amend commit to rewrite the commit message, indicating that it was a refactor and listing the changes I made. Finally, I merged this one commit into main. Here is the commit:

fac3141

Conclusion

Overall this lab was a simple introduction to rebasing and squashing several commits into one. Not only did I learn about git rebase, but I was able to freshen up on my unix commands and fix my project. I'm glad I had an easy lab this week since there's a lot to do in other courses and hacktoberfest.