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.
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