git commit folders

Gives you a folder for every commit in your git repository.

Extremely experimental software with lots of bugs but it works for me and I've found it a tiny bit useful.

how to use it

go build
./git-commit-folders -type nfs -mountpoint /tmp/mntdir

It'll mount a /tmp/mntdir directory with all your commits in it, then in another terminal tab you can run:

ls /tmp/mntdir

how it works

It mounts a virtual filesystem (using NFS, fuse, or WebDav) and mounts it with the mount command. It doesn't work on Windows but probably could be made to.

Because the filesystem is backed by your .git directory, it doesn't use any disk space. It more or less updates live, though I've noticed that sometimes the NFS version lags behind a bit, probably because of caching.

NFS, FUSE, DAV

there are 3 different filesystem implementations. I'd suggest:

• -type fuse if you're on Linux
• -type nfs if you're on Mac OS (because FUSE on Mac is annoying)
• -type webdav is broken because I couldn't get symlinks on webdav to work. just leaving the webdav code in there in case it's salvageable.

You can try to use the FUSE version on Mac with MacFuse or FUSE-T if you want though.

a tour of the folders

I might change all of this but right now there are four main subfolders. commits/ contains all the commits, and everything else is a symlink to a commit.

$ ls /tmp/mntdir
branches/  branch_histories/  commits/  tags/

commits

the commits/ directory is split by commit prefix so that it isn't horrible to list. For example:

$ ls /tmp/mntdir/commits/
0a  02  1a  2c  3e  5a  6c  7e  9a  12  20  28  36  44  52  60  68  76
$ ls /tmp/mntdir/commits/73/73a0/
73a08ab44ccbf1a305c458c35ab35661f0b7a7f3
$ ls /tmp/mntdir/commits/da/da83/da83dce00782814ecfd33ef6d968ff9e43188a94/
branches.go  commit.go  go.mod  go.sum  main.go  symlink.go

tags

$ ls /tmp/mntdir/tags/
v0.000@
$ ls /tmp/mntdir/tags/v0.000/
branches.go  branch_histories.go  commit.go  go.mod  go.sum  main.go  symlink.go  tags.go

branches

$ ls /tmp/mntdir/branches/
main@  test@
$ ls /tmp/mntdir/branches/main/
branches.go  branch_histories.go  commit.go  go.mod  go.sum  main.go  symlink.go

branch histories

shows the last 100 commits on a branch. They're numbered, 0 is the most recent.

here we'll look at the code from 4 versions ago

$ ls /tmp/mntdir/branch_histories/main/
00-f1e4200744ae2fbe584d3ad3638cf61593a11624@  02-dc49186e766bcdb62a3958533a62d3fd626b253e@  04-b9c9e9f09cc918825066f105d62c550cc3c0958e@
01-03bf66122c3acf44fb781f27cd41415af75fcbe4@  03-da83dce00782814ecfd33ef6d968ff9e43188a94@  05-97d8dea79acb702b3ad66e08218c26c2fda9b1de@
$ ls /tmp/mntdir/branch_histories/main/04-b9c9e9f09cc918825066f105d62c550cc3c0958e/
commit.go  go.mod  go.sum  main.go

cool stuff you can do

you can go into your branch and grep for the code you deleted!

$ cd /tmp/mntdir/branch_histories/main
$ grep 'func readBlob' */commit.go
03-fc450bb99460b9b793fcc36ca79b74caf6a9bc2a/commit.go:func readBlob(repo *git.Repository, id plumbing.Hash) ([]byte, error) {

bugs

there are 1 million bugs and limitations. I may or may not ever fix any of them. It's read only so it shouldn't do any harm to your git repository though, I think the worst thing that can happen is that it'll mislead you about something or be really slow to unmount. Also it caches every commit ID in your repository in memory so maybe that's bad if you have a truly gigantic repository.

thanks

thanks to vasi for explaining one hundred things about filesystems to me

similar projects

• Rust Git FUSE: https://github.com/fanzeyi/giblefs
• Swift GIT FUSE: https://belkadan.com/blog/2023/11/GitMounter/
• git for plan 9: https://orib.dev/git9.html