Keeping a personalised/customised zAppBuild up-to-date

[dennis-behm]

In the recent weeks, I got a couple of queries, how a customised version of zAppBuild can be kept up-to-date when the public git repository was not cloned into the on-premise git provider and just downloaded - basically people could not follow these instructions: making-zappbuild-available-in-your-git-provider

Let me share what other customers do to make it easier to get the latest updates from the public zAppbuild repository –

If you are in the very early stages of using zAppbuild, you can follow the below steps:

• Start of a defined release of zAppBuild and download it.
• Pushed the downloaded files into their git provider. This commit becomes the “common” reference .
• They create an “ibm” branch off this commit point. This will be a long-living branch. Any new zAppBuild Release that comes out, they download and then do a full replace of the files (locally). For updated files, that will cause a standard diff, and also makes sure to cover the case if we move /delete any files in the repo.
• Maintain the customized version of zAppBuild on “main”.
• To sync updates into their customized version, they create a feature branch of main and then merge the ibm branch into it. Because it now has a common ancestor commit point in their histories, git helps during the merge process!

If you are in situation where the git histories don't have a common ancestor commit, and you already started with zAppBuild some time ago - you can go through these:

• Wipe out what you have today (but make sure you keep a copy 😊 )
• Identify the release when you started with zAppBuild. Get the release from the releases and download it.
• Create the ibm branch, get a copy of the latest zAppBuild and perform the above steps.
• Get your copy of your customizations and apply them to main. This preserves your changes that you have done.
• Sync main (which is now back the state you have today) and the ibm branch through a new feature branch.