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Comments on What is the point of triggering CI/CD with an empty git commit?
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What is the point of triggering CI/CD with an empty git commit?
I read posts (e.g., 1, 2, 3) that recommend triggering a CI build process by pushing an empty git commit.
I don't understand how this is a good idea as the commit history will be peppered with meaningless entries, and they can't be removed without re-writing the hashes (e.g., git rebase --interactive, anything from this list), so any clean-up will require a force push (which should be avoided if others also work on that branch).
For example,
BEFORE REBASE:
* c074c70 (HEAD -> master) yet another major item
* bd8e835 trigger CI
* 49ddd75 trigger CI
* f895e9f this is important
* a7da744 trigger CI
* cec6a60 trigger CI
* 96e84f7 init
$ git rebase --interactive 96e84f7
AFTER DROPPING ALL EMPTY COMMITS:
* e441b17 (HEAD -> master) yet another major item
* fc67d54 this is important
* 96e84f7 init
THE ONLY COMMIT THAT RETAINED IT'S ORIGINAL HASH IS "init".
Post
Based on the SO comments, this is not a good general practice, and I believe the point of the posts mentioned in the question is that
- it can be done (but one probably shouldn't)
- this can be used to test a CI/CD build service/system without having to add a contrived change.
It seems that a good general rule would be to push empty commits only to personal work branches, and remove them before a pull request and/or merging to master/main.
The SO thread Pushing empty commits to remote asks questions (see below) that would answer this thread, but they have been completely ignored there.
Are there any disadvantages/consequences of pushing empty commits? Is there any problem I might face in future because of this empty commit??
Apparently, there is also the practice of starting a repo with an empty commit. Read the post a couple of times, but still don't understand the reasoning (and I suspect that it is perhaps a satirical post).
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