jj/docs/bookmarks.md

Bookmarks

Introduction

Bookmarks are named pointers to revisions (just like branches are in Git). You can move them without affecting the target revision's identity. Bookmarks automatically move when revisions are rewritten (e.g. by jj rebase). You can pass a bookmark's name to commands that want a revision as argument. For example, jj new main will create a new revision on top of the main bookmark. Use jj bookmark list to list bookmarks and jj bookmark <subcommand> to create, move, or delete bookmarks. There is currently no concept of an active/current/checked-out bookmark.

Mapping to Git branches

Jujutsu maps its bookmarks to Git branches when interacting with Git repos. For example, jj git push --bookmark foo will push the state of the foo bookmark to the foo branch on the Git remote. Similarly, if you create a bar branch in the backing Git repo, then a subsequent jj git import will create a bar bookmark (reminder: that import happens automatically in colocated repos).

Remotes and tracked bookmarks

Jujutsu records the last seen position of a bookmark on each remote (just like Git's remote-tracking branches). This record is updated on every jj git fetch and jj git push of the bookmark. You can refer to the remembered remote bookmark positions with <bookmark name>@<remote name>, such as jj new main@origin. jj does not provide a way to manually edit these recorded positions.

A remote bookmark can be associated with a local bookmark of the same name. This is called a tracked remote bookmark (which maps to a Git remote branch when using the Git backend). When you pull a tracked bookmark from a remote, any changes compared to the current record of the remote's state will be propagated to the corresponding local bookmark, which will be created if it doesn't exist already.

!!! note "Details: how fetch pulls bookmarks"

Let's say you run `jj git fetch --remote origin` and, during the fetch, `jj`
determines that the remote's `main` bookmark has been moved so that its target is
now ahead of the local record in `main@origin`.

`jj` will then update `main@origin` to the new target. If `main@origin` is
**tracked**, `jj` will also apply the change to the local bookmark `main`. If the
local target has also been moved compared to `main@origin` (probably because you
ran `jj bookmark set main`), then the two updates will be merged. If one is ahead
of the other, then that target will become the new target. Otherwise, the local
bookmark will become conflicted (see the ["Conflicts" section](#conflicts) below
for details).

Most commands don't show the tracked remote bookmark if it has the same target as the local bookmark. The local bookmark (without @<remote name>) is considered the bookmark's desired target. Consequently, if you want to update a bookmark on a remote, you first update the bookmark locally and then push the update to the remote. If a local bookmark also exists on some remote but points to a different target there, jj log will show the bookmark name with an asterisk suffix (e.g. main*). That is meant to remind you that you may want to push the bookmark to some remote.

If you want to know the internals of bookmark tracking, consult the Design Doc.

Terminology summary

• A remote bookmark is a bookmark ref on the remote. jj can find out its actual state only when it's actively communicating with the remote. However, jj does store the last-seen position of the remote bookmark; this is the commit jj show <bookmark name>@<remote name> would show. This notion is completely analogous to Git's "remote-tracking bookmarks".
• A tracked (remote) bookmark is defined above. You can make a remote bookmark tracked with the jj bookmark track command, for example.
• A tracking (local) bookmark is the local bookmark that jj tries to keep in sync with the tracked remote bookmark. For example, after jj bookmark track mybookmark@origin, there will be a local bookmark mybookmark that's tracking the remote mybookmark@origin bookmark. A local bookmark can track a bookmark of the same name on 0 or more remotes.

The notion of tracked bookmarks serves a similar function to the Git notion of an "upstream branch". Unlike Git, a single local bookmark can be tracking remote bookmarks on multiple remotes, and the names of the local and remote bookmarks must match.

Manually tracking a bookmark

To track a bookmark permanently use jj bookmark track <bookmark name>@<remote name>. It will now be imported as a local bookmark until you untrack it or it is deleted on the remote.

Example:

$ # List all available bookmarks, as we want our colleague's bookmark.
$ jj bookmark list --all
$ # Find the bookmark.
$ # [...]
$ # Actually track the bookmark.
$ jj bookmark track <bookmark name>@<remote name> # Example: jj bookmark track my-feature@origin
$ # From this point on, <bookmark name> will be imported when fetching from <remote name>.
$ jj git fetch --remote <remote name>
$ # A local bookmark <bookmark name> should have been created or updated while fetching.
$ jj new <bookmark name> # Do some local testing, etc.

Untracking a bookmark

To stop following a remote bookmark, you can jj bookmark untrack it. After that, subsequent fetches of that remote will no longer move the local bookmark to match the position of the remote bookmark.

Example:

$ # List all local and remote bookmarks.
$ jj bookmark list --all
$ # Find the bookmark we no longer want to track.
$ # [...]
# # Actually untrack it.
$ jj bookmark untrack <bookmark name>@<remote name> # Example: jj bookmark untrack stuff@origin
$ # From this point on, this remote bookmark won't be imported anymore.
$ # The local bookmark (e.g. stuff) is unaffected. It may or may not still
$ # be tracking bookmarks on other remotes (e.g. stuff@upstream).

Listing tracked bookmarks

To list tracked bookmarks, you can jj bookmark list --tracked or jj bookmark list -t. This command omits local Git-tracking bookmarks by default.

You can see if a specific bookmark is tracked with jj bookmark list --tracked <bookmark name>.

Automatic tracking of bookmarks & git.auto-local-bookmark option

There are two situations where jj tracks bookmarks automatically. jj git clone automatically sets up the default remote bookmark (e.g. main@origin) as tracked. When you push a local bookmark, the newly created bookmark on the remote is marked as tracked.

By default, every other remote bookmark is marked as "not tracked" when it's fetched. If desired, you need to manually jj bookmark track them. This works well for repositories where multiple people work on a large number of bookmarks.

The default can be changed by setting the config git.auto-local-bookmark = true. Then, jj git fetch tracks every newly fetched bookmark with a local bookmark. Branches that already existed before the jj git fetch are not affected. This is similar to Mercurial, which fetches all its bookmarks (equivalent to Git bookmarks) by default.

Bookmark movement

Currently Jujutsu automatically moves local bookmarks when these conditions are met:

• When a commit has been rewritten (e.g, when you rebase) bookmarks and the working-copy will move along with it.
• When a commit has been abandoned, all associated bookmarks will be moved to its parent(s). If a working copy was pointing to the abandoned commit, then a new working-copy commit will be created on top of the parent(s).

You could describe the movement as following along the change-id of the current bookmark commit, even if it isn't entirely accurate.

Pushing bookmarks: Safety checks

Before jj git push actually moves, creates, or deletes a remote bookmark, it makes several safety checks.

1. jj will contact the remote and check that the actual state of the remote bookmark matches jj's record of its last known position. If there is a conflict, jj will refuse to push the bookmark. In this case, you need to run jj git fetch --remote <remote name> and resolve the resulting bookmark conflict. Then, you can try jj git push again.

   If you are familiar with Git, this makes jj git push similar to git push --force-with-lease.

   There are a few cases where jj git push will succeed even though the remote bookmark is in an unexpected location. These are the cases where jj git fetch would not create a bookmark conflict and would not move the local bookmark, e.g. if the unexpected location is identical to the local position of the bookmark.

2. The local bookmark must not be conflicted. If it is, you would need to use jj bookmark set, for example, to resolve the conflict.

   This makes jj git push safe even if jj git fetch is performed on a timer in the background (this situation is a known issue¹ with some forms of git push --force-with-lease). If the bookmark moves on a remote in a problematic way, jj git fetch will create a conflict. This should ensure that the user becomes aware of the conflict before they can jj git push and override the bookmark on the remote.

3. If the remote bookmark already exists on the remote, it must be tracked. If the bookmark does not already exist on the remote, there is no problem; jj git push will create the remote bookmark and mark it as tracked.

Conflicts

Bookmarks can end up in a conflicted state. When that happens, jj status will include information about the conflicted bookmarks (and instructions for how to mitigate it). jj bookmark list will have details. jj log will show the bookmark name with a double question mark suffix (e.g. main??) on each of the conflicted bookmark's potential target revisions. Using the bookmark name to look up a revision will resolve to all potential targets. That means that jj new main will error out, complaining that the revset resolved to multiple revisions.

Both local bookmarks (e.g. main) and the remote bookmark (e.g. main@origin) can have conflicts. Both can end up in that state if concurrent operations were run in the repo. The local bookmark more typically becomes conflicted because it was updated both locally and on a remote.

To resolve a conflicted state in a local bookmark (e.g. main), you can move the bookmark to the desired target with jj bookmark move. You may want to first either merge the conflicted targets with jj new (e.g. jj new 'all:main'), or you may want to rebase one side on top of the other with jj rebase.

To resolve a conflicted state in a remote bookmark (e.g. main@origin), simply pull from the remote (e.g. jj git fetch). The conflict resolution will also propagate to the local bookmark (which was presumably also conflicted).

Ease of use

The use of bookmarks is frequent in some workflows, for example, when interacting with Git repositories containing branches. To this end, one-letter shortcuts have been implemented, both for the jj bookmark command itself through an alias (as jj b), and for its subcommands. For example, jj bookmark create BOOKMARK-NAME can be abbreviated as jj b c BOOKMARK-NAME.

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1. See "A general note on safety" in https://git-scm.com/docs/git-push#Documentation/git-push.txt---no-force-with-lease ↩︎