go-git

A low level and highly extensible git client library for reading repositories from git servers. It is written in Go from scratch, without any C dependencies.

We have been following the open/close principle in its design to facilitate extensions.

go-git does not claim to be a replacement of git2go as its approach and functionality is quite different.

ok, but why? ...

At source{d} we analyze almost all the public open source contributions made to git repositories in the world.

We want to extract detailed information from each GitHub repository, which requires downloading repository packfiles and analyzing them: extracting their code, authors, dates and the languages and ecosystems they use. We are also interested in knowing who contributes to what, so we can tell top contributors from the more casual ones.

You can obtain all this information using the standard git command running over a local clone of a repository, but this simple solution does not scale well over millions of repositories: we want to avoid having local copies of the unpacked repositories in a regular file system; go-git allows us to work with an in-memory representation of repositories instead.

I see... but this is production ready?

Yes!!!, we have been using go-git at source{d} since August 2015 to analyze all GitHub public repositories (i.e. 16M of repositories).

Coming Soon

Blame support: right now we are using a forward version of a line-tracking algorithm and we are having some problems handling merges. The plan is to get merges right and change to a backward line-tracking algorithm soon.

Installation

The recommended way to install go-git is:

go get -u gopkg.in/src-d/go-git.v4/...

Examples

Retrieving the commits for a given repository:

r, err := git.NewRepository("https://github.com/src-d/go-git", nil)
if err != nil {
	panic(err)
}

if err := r.PullDefault(); err != nil {
	panic(err)
}

iter, err := r.Commits()
if err != nil {
	panic(err)
}
defer iter.Close()

for {
	//the commits are not sorted in any special order
	commit, err := iter.Next()
	if err != nil {
		if err == io.EOF {
			break
		}

		panic(err)
	}

	fmt.Println(commit)
}

Outputs:

commit 2275fa7d0c75d20103f90b0e1616937d5a9fc5e6
Author: Máximo Cuadros <mcuadros@gmail.com>
Date:   2015-10-23 00:44:33 +0200 +0200

commit 35b585759cbf29f8ec428ef89da20705d59f99ec
Author: Carlos Cobo <toqueteos@gmail.com>
Date:   2015-05-20 15:21:37 +0200 +0200

commit 7e3259c191a9de23d88b6077dcb1cd427e925432
Author: Alberto Cortés <alberto@sourced.tech>
Date:   2016-01-21 03:29:57 +0100 +0100

commit 24b8ae50db91f3909b11304014564bffc6fdee79
Author: Alberto Cortés <alberto@sourced.tech>
Date:   2015-12-11 17:57:10 +0100 +0100
...

Retrieving the latest commit for a given repository:

r, err := git.NewRepository("https://github.com/src-d/go-git", nil)
if err != nil {
	panic(err)
}

if err := r.PullDefault(); err != nil {
	panic(err)
}

hash, err := r.Remotes[git.DefaultRemoteName].Head()
if err != nil {
	panic(err)
}

commit, err := r.Commit(hash)
if err != nil {
	panic(err)
}

fmt.Println(commit)

Creating a repository from an ordinary local git directory (that has been previously prepared by running git gc on it).

// Download any git repository and prepare it as as follows:
//
//   $ git clone https://github.com/src-d/go-git /tmp/go-git
//   $ pushd /tmp/go-git ; git gc ; popd
//
// Then, create a go-git repository from the local content
// and print its commits as follows:

package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"io"

	"gopkg.in/src-d/go-git.v4"
	"gopkg.in/src-d/go-git.v4/utils/fs"
)

func main() {
	fs := fs.NewOS() // a simple proxy for the local host filesystem
	path := "/tmp/go-git/.git"

	repo, err := git.NewRepositoryFromFS(fs, path)
	if err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}

	iter, err := repo.Commits()
	if err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}
	defer iter.Close()

	for {
		commit, err := iter.Next()
		if err != nil {
			if err == io.EOF {
				break
			}
			panic(err)
		}

		fmt.Println(commit)
	}
}

Implementing your own filesystem will let you access repositories stored on remote services (e.g. amazon S3), see the examples directory for a simple filesystem implementation and usage.

Wrapping

go-git can be wrapped into any language which supports shared library interop. Python wrapper already exists. This is provided by "cshared" cgo files which can be built with go build -o libgogit.so -buildmode=c-shared github.com/src-d/go-git/cshared.

Acknowledgements

The earlier versions of the packfile reader are based on git-chain, project done by @yrashk

License

MIT, see LICENSE