emacs' git-link and sourcegraph

I use sourcegraph for searching code, and I sometimes need to share a link to the source code I’m looking at in a buffer. For this, the package git-link is great.

To integrate sourcegraph and git-link, the documentation recommends adding a remote entry named sourcegraph in the repository, like this:

git remote add sourcegraph https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/sshaw/copy-as-format

The next time you run M-x git-link in a buffer, it will use the URL associated with that remote. That’s works great, except that now you need to add this for every repository. Instead, for my usage, I came up with the following solution:

(use-package git-link
  :ensure t
  :after magit
  :bind (("C-c g l" . git-link)
         ("C-c g a" . git-link-commit))
  :config
  (defun fcuny/get-sg-remote-from-hostname (hostname)
    (format "sourcegraph.<$domain>.<$tld>/%s" hostname))

  (defun fcuny/git-link-work-sourcegraph (hostname dirname filename _branch commit start end)
    ;;; For a given repository, build the proper link for sourcegraph.
    ;;; Use the default branch of the repository instead of the
    ;;; current one (we might be on a feature branch that is not
    ;;; available on the remote).
    (require 'magit-branch)
    (let ((sg-base-url (fcuny/get-sg-remote-from-hostname hostname))
          (main-branch (magit-main-branch)))
      (git-link-sourcegraph sg-base-url dirname filename main-branch commit start end)))

  (defun fcuny/git-link-commit-work-sourcegraph (hostname dirname commit)
    (let ((sg-base-url (fcuny/get-sg-remote-from-hostname hostname)))
      (git-link-commit-sourcegraph sg-base-url dirname commit)))

  (add-to-list 'git-link-remote-alist '("twitter" fcuny/git-link-work-sourcegraph))
  (add-to-list 'git-link-commit-remote-alist '("twitter" fcuny/git-link-commit-work-sourcegraph))

  (setq git-link-open-in-browser 't))

We use different domains to host various git repositories at work (e.g. git.$work, gitfoo.$work, etc). Each of them map to a different URI for sourcegraph (e.g. sourcegraph.$work/gitfoo).

git-link-commit-remote-alist is an association list that takes a regular expression and a function. The custom function receives the hostname for the remote repository, which is then used to generate the URI for our sourcegraph instance. I then call git-link-sourcegraph replacing the hostname with the URI for sourcegraph.

Now I can run M-x git-link in any repository where the host for the origin git repository matches twitter without having to setup the custom remote first.

August 24, 2021