Your git history already knows what you did

Description and use

The tool syncs Plane with git history, automatically creating and completing work items to eliminate discrepancies between the tracker and actual commits.

Problem

Teams struggle to keep project trackers aligned with git history, leading to inaccurate sprint boards.

Outcome

The backfill tool synchronizes Plane with git history, reducing manual entry errors and aligning sprint boards with actual commits.

Workflow

• Run plane-workflow backfill to read git log and group commits into work items based on path map, commit scope, and folder.
• Determine start and target dates from first and last commits, adjusted to business days.
• Review the proposed items—rename, regroup, or skip—without writing to Plane.
• Apply the items: create, start, and complete each work item in Plane, adding a comment listing its commits.
• Handle rate limits, timeouts, misleading errors, and missing estimates with retries, external_id stability, and informative responses.

Evidence

Git already records what changed, when, and by whom. Conventional commits even say what kind of change: fix(auth): ... or feat(billing): ...

Source

The backfill flow has four steps: Plan, Date, Review, Apply

Source

Rate limits. Plane returns 429 quickly when you create, start, and complete dozens of items. Requests now back off and honor Retry-After.

Source

A create can time out on the client and still succeed on the server. A naive retry duplicates it. Every create now carries a stable external_id derived from the item's first commit, so a retry, or a whole re-run, finds the existing item instead.

Source