Oiax

Oiax is a declarative Git branch promotion reconciler for repositories that model environments as long-lived branches.

Given a declared promotion graph, it observes branch and forge state and ensures the pull requests required to move changes through that graph exist — exactly one active managed request per diverged edge — the posture release-please takes toward release pull requests, applied to environment promotion.

The name is the Greek οἴαξ — the tiller, the handle fitted to the rudder head. Oiax removes Git workflow toil; a hand stays on the tiller. Approval, validation, and policy gates remain wherever the repository already puts them.

Planned characteristics

• Promotion graph declared as data in a repository-local file.
• Content-based divergence detection that survives squash and rebase merges.
• Backflow: hotfixes landed on downstream branches are returned to the authoritative source branch via cherry-picked, deterministically named branches.
• Runs in CI — GitHub Actions first — with no persistent control plane.
• Idempotent and safe under concurrent, repeated, or missed invocations.

Design boundary

Oiax manages the Git workflow that expresses promotion; it owns no promotion decisions and never merges its own pull requests. It serves teams below the control-plane threshold — branch-per-environment repositories on plain Argo CD or Flux. Teams running Keleustes do not need it for the applications Keleustes manages.