Does linguist load global/system gitattributes?

[raphaelyancey]

I'm trying to make some languages detectable widly for every repository on a server.

I created a /etc/gitattributes (system) and a /home/git/.gitattributes (user-global) but neither of them seems to be taken into account, only a .gitattribute in the repository root.

Does linguist load global/system gitattributes?

Edit: the user-wide config is ~/.config/git/attributes and not /home/git/.gitattributes (but doesn't work either)

[pchaigno]

Linguist runs on GitHub.com (and GitLab.com) so it cannot know the content of files on your local system; if the .gitattributes file is not pushed to GitHub.com, Linguist won't see it.

[raphaelyancey]

@pchaigno In this case it is a self-hosted GitLab instance. So linguist has access to all the repositories on the server. I'd like linguist (in this GitLab) to detect some other files that are not the programming type, like .pd (Pure Data).

According to git docs, if no .gitattributes is present in the repository root directory, it should try ~/.gitattributes and $(prefix)/etc/gitattributes right?

[pchaigno]

According to git docs, if no .gitattributes is present in the repository root directory, it should try ~/.gitattributes and $(prefix)/etc/gitattributes right?

We use Rugged::Repository.fetch_attributes to retrieve the .gitattributes values. I don't know if it tries the global settings first. @vmg might know more since he authored that code.

[lildude]

Hmmm, I'm pretty sure GitLab doesn't take /etc/gitattributes into account when assessing a repository, regardless of whether Linguist does or not.

[raphaelyancey]

Hmmm, I'm pretty sure GitLab doesn't take /etc/gitattributes into account when assessing a repository, regardless of whether Linguist does or not.

I followed the whole path from a /languages API request on GitLab and I ended up on this function, which seems to simply call linguist with the repository path and a ref as parameters, and parse its output. Attributes handling seems to happen deeper than GitLab app, in Rugged as @pchaigno pointed out.

I just tested Rugged on local repositories (bare and non-bare) and it only takes .gitattributes (non-bare) and info/attributes (bare) into account when reading attributes with .fetch_attributes(). Didn't catch ~/.gitattributes (and not tested with /etc/attributes).

Should I fill a issue over there?

[ZJvandeWeg]

GitLabber here, at the time of writing we don't read anything outside of the repository for linguist. Just to confirm, like previously stated by @pcantrell in #4283 (comment)

@raphaelyancey My understanding is that it would be filed against either Rugged, the Ruby wrapper around LibGit2, or Libgit2 itself.

[pchaigno]

Closing in favor of libgit2/rugged#765.

[ineshbose]

Does this mean that if I want to test changes to my .gitattributes, I need to push to remote everytime?

[lildude]

Does this mean that if I want to test changes to my .gitattributes, I need to push to remote everytime?

No. If you have Linguist installed locally, you can commit your changes to the repo and run Linguist against the repo.

If you don't have Linguist installed locally, then yes, you will need to commit your changes, push, and then wait for GitHub to run Linguist against your repo.

PS. this really should have been a new discussion rather than a comment on an issue that was closed over 4 years ago 😉