Trigger CI/CD Rebuild Without Trivial Changes
Recently, someone on my team asked how they could trigger a rebuild of a branch on our continuous delivery/integration agent.
The initial suggestion was to introduce a trivial change - such as adding/removing whitespace to the README. This is a viable option, and one I would have also suggested. At least, until I saw a method that does not require any changes.
I could not remember the specifics of this method though. To make matters worse, I was having trouble locating the information again. This post is to prevent this situation from happening again.
How
Simply put, you tell git to allow empty change sets.
1 | git commit --allow-empty -m "Trigger Rebuild" |
What other useful git nuggets exist that people may not be aware of?
References
I’ve used git for years, but I just realized I can make empty commits to trigger CI pipelines:
git commit --allow-empty -m "Updated upstream code"
Usually recording a commit that has the exact same tree as its sole parent commit is a mistake, and the command prevents you from making such a commit. This option bypasses the safety, and is primarily for use by foreign SCM interface scripts.
- git-scm