Code Review with Git Patches and Outlook via PowerShell

In the spirit of “simplest thing that works,” my team has a rather

low-fidelity approach to code reviews: patch files and e-mail. Nothing

fancy, but we find it works rather well. It’s even easier thanks to git format-patch, which lets me easily generate a patch per commit, but I was never able to get send-email to work quite like I wanted. Instead, I whipped together a PowerShell script in a few minutes that does just the trick:

function patch ($ref = 'master..', $Message = '', [switch]$KeepFiles) {
  $patchPaths = $(git format-patch -C -o C:/Temp/Patches $ref)
  if($patchPaths) {
    $outlook = New-Object -ComObject Outlook.Application
    $mail = $outlook.CreateItem(0)
    [void]$mail.Recipients.Add('[email protected]')
    $mail.Subject = "Review - $Message"
    $commits = $(git log -C --pretty=format:'%s' --reverse $ref) | foreach {  "<li>$_</li>" }
    $mail.HTMLBody = "<ol style=`"font: 11pt Calibri`">$commits</ol>"
    $patchPaths | foreach {
      [void]$mail.Attachments.Add($_)
      if(!$KeepFiles) { Remove-Item $_ }
    }
    $mail.Display()
  } else {
    Write-Warning 'Nothing to patch!'
  }
}

Usage:

Create patch of everything on current branch since master:

patch -m "Issue 123 - This is neat"

Create patch of last two commits, without message:

patch HEAD~2..

Create patch of everything except the current commit, with message:

patch master..HEAD~1 'Refactoring for Story 234'