Compare two branches

Goal. Find out what changed on a branch. About a minute.

You need. Two branches. Isolate an experiment makes the second one.

Diff them

strata ./shop branch diff default experiment

branch_a  default
branch_b  experiment

SPACE    CAPABILITY  CHANGE    IDENTITY  VERSION
default  json        modified  config          9

One row per changed thing. CHANGE is added, modified or removed, CAPABILITY says which data model it belongs to, and IDENTITY is the key, document, node or collection that moved.

What just happened

diff compares state, not history. It does not care how many writes produced the difference or in what order; it reports where the two branches disagree right now. A key written five times on the branch and once back to its original value does not appear at all.

The argument order is branch_a then branch_b, and the output labels them, so a diff read backwards is obvious rather than silently inverted.

Reading it in a script

--json gives the same content as a structure, and --raw gives tab-separated rows with no header:

strata ./shop --raw branch diff default experiment

That is the form to pipe into awk or cut. Global options covers all three formats.

Failure modes

Nothing comes back but you expected changes. Check you are diffing the right pair, and remember diff compares current state: a change that was undone leaves no trace here.

A branch name is not found. branch list shows what exists, with each branch’s parent.

Next

Preview a merge, which answers the different question of whether those changes can land.