One of the most common actions of a developer working on a WordPress.com VIP-hosted project is committing code through our review workflow. We want to get your code deployed quickly while also making sure it is secure and performant, and this process involves human review. (Read more about why we do code reviews.)
A few months ago, we implemented automated PHP CodeSniffer checks on incoming commits. This allows us to provide some kinds of feedback on your commits right away, speeding up the overall review feedback process. As always, we encourage you to set up PHPCS in your local development environment too.
We also ask you to keep your commits small. Large commits take longer to review, can be more complex and can hold up other commits. If the changeset is larger than about 1,000 lines of code it may need more time than our traditional review/deploy workflow facilitates, to give it the proper attention it deserves. In these cases we may revert the commit and ask you to consider smaller, more atomic commits, or push the changes to a scheduled review and follow up in a support ticket about planning a timeline for that.
When we consider the size of a changeset we’re looking at the pending commits sitting in the queue. For example, if there are 3 commits around 900 lines each all committed fairly close together it’s likely we’ll end up looking at all of these as a single changeset. That would push over the limit and we may need to take a bit longer to perform the review, or review those outside of the review/deploy queue.
There are several ways commits can have a more efficient journey through the queue;
- Commits should have less than 1,000 lines of new or modified PHP and unminified JS (aka reviewable code),
- Changesets should be logical, atomic and well described (read our docs on creating good changesets),
- The commit message should follow our guidelines on writing good commit messages.
Whenever you’re in doubt, please open a ticket with us and check first. We’ll always be happy to help you think about ways to create smaller commits so they have a smooth journey through to deployment.
Happy committing!
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