Advanced Features

If you feel confident in your Gerrit-fu, this page is for you. Perhaps you've already noticed how Gerrit brings a few good improvements to the workflow just based on the commit-centric design. Now we are getting to the really cool stuff: Gerrit-specific features that further enhance your experience!

WIP Changes

Want to mark a change as WIP? You can do it in the Web UI. Or you can do it immediately on push:

git push origin HEAD:refs/for/main%wip

Submitting Chains of Changes

In traditional Git forges, it is hard to submit multiple changes to one repo at once. Perhaps you want to avoid unnecessary rebuilds - or broken intermediate states. You might have to coordinate with people, plan downtime, or create meta-PRs to do that.

Thankfully, Gerrit has topics for that! Assign a topic to necessary CLs, or set it on push:

git push origin HEAD:refs/for/master%topic=<username>-<ISO8601 date>-<topic name>

For example:

git push origin HEAD:refs/for/master%topic=kfearsoff-2025-03-29-rebranding

Why the convoluted naming scheme? Unfortunately, Gerrit doesn't namespace topics, so we do a funny naming scheme to prevent accidental collisions. We are truly sorry for this.

Once all changes in a topic are reviewed, they can be gracefully sent all at once!

Syncing Multiple Repos

In traditional Git forges, it is always a huge pain when you need to submit a batch of changes at once to multiple repos.

Topics to the rescue, again! Just follow the instructions for chains of changes, but in multiple repos. Isn't that awesome?