gitoxide is an implementation of git written in Rust for developing future-proof applications which strive for correctness and
performance while providing a pleasant and unsurprising developer experience.
There are two primary ways to use gitoxide:
- As Rust library: Use the
gix crate as a Cargo dependency for API access.
- As command-line tool: The
gix binary as development tool to help testing the API in real repositories,
and the ein binary with workflow-enhancing tools. Both binaries may forever be unstable,
do not rely on them in scripts.
Development Status
The command-line tools as well as the status of each crate is described in
the crate status document.
For use in applications, look for the gix crate,
which serves as entrypoint to the functionality provided by various lower-level plumbing crates like
gix-config.
Feature Discovery
Can gix do what I need it to do?
The above can be hard to answer and this paragraph is here to help with feature discovery.
Look at crate-status.md for a rather exhaustive document that contains
both implemented and planned features.
Further, the gix crate documentation with the git2 search term helps to find all currently
known git2 equivalent method calls. Please note that this list is definitely not exhaustive yet, but might help if you are coming from git2.
What follows is a high-level list of features and those which are planned:
- clone
- fetch
- push
- blame (plumbing)
- status
- blob and tree-diff
- merge
- commit
- commit-graph traversal
- rebase
- worktree checkout and worktree stream
- reset
- reading and writing of objects
- reading and writing of refs
- reading and writing of
.git/index
- reading and writing of git configuration
- pathspecs
- revspecs
-
.gitignore and .gitattributes
Crates
Follow linked crate name for detailed status. Please note that all crates follow semver as well as the stability guide.
Production Grade
Stability Tier 1
Stability Tier 2
Stabilization Candidates
Crates that seem feature complete and need to see some more use before they can be released as 1.0.
Documentation is complete and was reviewed at least once.
Initial Development
These crates may be missing some features and thus are somewhat incomplete, but what's there
is usable to some extent.
- usable (with rough but complete docs, possibly incomplete functionality)
- very early (possibly without any documentation and many rough edges)
- idea (just a name placeholder)
Stress Testing
- Verify huge packs
- Explode a pack to disk
- Generate and verify large commit graphs
- Generate huge pack from a lot of loose objects
Stability and MSRV
Our stability guide helps to judge how much churn can be expected when depending on crates in this workspace.
Installation
Download a Binary Release
Using cargo binstall, one is able to fetch binary releases. You can install it via cargo install cargo-binstall, assuming
the rust toolchain is present.
Then install gitoxide with cargo binstall gitoxide.
See the releases section for manual installation and various alternative builds that are slimmer or smaller, depending
on your needs, for Linux, MacOS and Windows.
Install with Homebrew
For macOS and Linux, gitoxide can be installed from Homebrew:
brew install gitoxide
Download from Arch Linux repository
For Arch Linux you can download gitoxide from community repository:
pacman -S gitoxide
Download from Exherbo Linux Rust repository
For Exherbo Linux you can download gitoxide from the Rust repository:
cave resolve -x repository/rust
cave resolve -x gitoxide
From Source via Cargo
cargo is the Rust package manager which can easily be obtained through rustup. With it, you can build your own binary
effortlessly and for your particular CPU for additional performance gains.
The minimum supported Rust version is documented in the Cargo package,
the latest stable one will work as well.
There are various build configurations, all of them are documented here. The documentation should also be useful
for packagers who need to tune external dependencies.
# A way to install `gitoxide` with just Rust and a C compiler installed.
# If there are problems with SSL certificates during clones, try to omit `--locked`.
cargo install gitoxide --locked --no-default-features --features max-pure
# The default installation, 'max', is the fastest, but also needs `cmake` to build successfully.
# Installing it is platform-dependent.
cargo install gitoxide
# For smaller binaries and even faster build times that are traded for a less fancy CLI implementation,
# use the `lean` feature.
cargo install gitoxide --locked --no-default-features --features lean
The following installs the latest unpublished max release directly from git:
cargo install --git https://github.com/GitoxideLabs/gitoxide gitoxide
How to deal with build failures
On some platforms, installation may fail due to lack of tools required by C toolchains. This can generally be avoided by installation with:
cargo install gitoxide --no-default-features --features max-pure
What follows is a list of known failures.
Using Docker
Some CI/CD pipelines leverage repository cloning. Below is a copy-paste-able example to build docker images for such workflows.
As no official image exists (at this time), an image must first be built.
[!NOTE]
The dockerfile isn't continuously tested as it costs too much time and thus might already be broken.
PRs are welcome.
Building the most compatible base image
docker build -f etc/docker/Dockerfile.alpine -t gitoxide:latest --compress . --target=pipeline
Basic usage in a Pipeline
For example, if a Dockerfile currently uses something like RUN git clone https://github.com/GitoxideLabs/gitoxide, first build the image:
docker build -f etc/docker/Dockerfile.alpine -t gitoxide:latest --compress .
Then copy the binaries into your image and replace the git directive with a gix equivalent.
COPY --from gitoxide:latest /bin/gix /usr/local/bin/
COPY --from gitoxide:latest /bin/ein /usr/local/bin/
RUN /usr/local/bin/gix clone --depth 1 https://github.com/GitoxideLabs/gitoxide gitoxide
Usage
Once installed, there are two binaries:
- ein
- high level commands, porcelain, for every-day use, optimized for a pleasant user experience
- gix
- low level commands, plumbing, for use in more specialized cases and to validate newly written code in real-world scenarios
Project Goals
Project goals can change over time as we learn more, and they can be challenged.
- a pure-rust implementation of git
- including transport, object database, references, cli and tui
- a simple command-line interface is provided for the most common git operations, optimized for
user experience. A simple-git if you so will.
- be the go-to implementation for anyone who wants to solve problems around git, and become
the alternative to
GitPython and libgit2 in the process.
- become the foundation for a distributed alternative to GitHub, and maybe even for use within GitHub itself
- learn from the best to write the best possible idiomatic Rust
- libgit2 is a fantastic resource to see what abstractions work, we will use them
- use Rust's type system to make misuse impossible
- be the best performing implementation
- use Rust's type system to optimize for work not done without being hard to use
- make use of parallelism from the get go
- sparse checkout support from day one
- assure on-disk consistency
- assure reads never interfere with concurrent writes
- assure multiple concurrent writes don't cause trouble
- take shortcuts, but not in quality
- binaries may use
anyhow::Error exhaustively, knowing these errors are solely user-facing.
- libraries use light-weight custom errors implemented using
quick-error or thiserror.
- internationalization is nothing we are concerned with right now.
- IO errors due to insufficient amount of open file handles don't always lead to operation failure
- Cross platform support, including Windows
- With the tools and experience available here there is no reason not to support Windows.
- Windows is tested on CI
and failures do prevent releases.
Non-Goals
Project non-goals can change over time as we learn more, and they can be challenged.
- replicate
git command functionality perfectly
git is git, and there is no reason to not use it. Our path is the one of simplicity to make
getting started with git easy.
- be incompatible to git
- the on-disk format must remain compatible, and we will never contend with it.
- use async IO everywhere
- for the most part, git operations are heavily reliant on memory mapped IO as well as CPU to decompress data,
which doesn't lend itself well to async IO out of the box.
- Use
blocking as well as gix-features::interrupt to bring operations into the async world and to control
long running operations.
- When connecting or streaming over TCP connections, especially when receiving on the server, async seems like a must
though, but behind a feature flag.
Contributions
If what you have seen so far sparked your interest to contribute, then let us say: We are happy to have you and help you to get started. What's paricularly welcome is the discovery of deviations from Git, or the prodding
and probing to find bugs and other forms of undesirable behaviour.
Please read the contribution guide before starting. It covers when prior discussion is required and how to prepare a submission.
Getting started with Video Tutorials
- Learning Rust with Gitoxide
- In 17 episodes you can learn all you need to meaningfully contribute to
gitoxide.
- Getting into Gitoxide
- Get an introduction to
gitoxide itself which should be a good foundation for any contribution, but isn't a requirement for contributions either.
- Gifting Gitoxide
- See how PRs are reviewed along with a lot of inner monologue.
Roadmap
Features for 1.0
Provide a CLI to for the most basic user journey:
- initialize a repository
- fetch
- clone a repository
- create a commit after adding worktree files
- add a remote
- push
Ideas for Examples
-
gix tool open-remote open the URL of the remote, possibly after applying known transformations to go from ssh to https.
-
tix as example implementation of tig, displaying a version of the commit graph, useful for practicing how highly responsive GUIs can be made.
- Something like
git-sizer, but leveraging extreme decompression speeds of indexed packs.
- Open up SQL for git using sqlite virtual tables. Check out gitqlite
as well. What would an MVP look like? Maybe even something that could ship with gitoxide. See this go implementation as example.
- A truly awesome history rewriter which makes it easy to understand what happened while avoiding all pitfalls. Think BFG, but more awesome, if that's possible.
-
gix-tui should learn a lot from fossil-scm regarding the presentation of data. Maybe this can be used for prompts. Probably magit has a lot to offer, too.
Ideas for Spin-Offs
- A system to integrate tightly with
gix-lfs to allow a multi-tier architecture so that assets can be stored in git and are accessible quickly from an intranet location
(for example by accessing the storage read-only over the network) while changes are pushed immediately by the server to other edge locations, like the cloud or backups. Sparse checkouts along with explorer/finder integrations
make it convenient to only work on a small subset of files locally. Clones can contain all configuration somebody would need to work efficiently from their location,
and authentication for the git history as well as LFS resources make the system secure. One could imagine encryption support for untrusted locations in the cloud
even though more research would have to be done to make it truly secure.
- A syncthing like client/server application. This is to demonstrate how lower-level crates can be combined into custom applications that use
only part of git's technology to achieve their very own thing. Watch out for big file support, multi-device cross-syncing, the possibility for
untrusted destinations using full-encryption, case-insensitive and sensitive filesystems, and extended file attributes as well as ignore files.
- An event-based database that uses commit messages to store deltas, while occasionally aggregating the actual state in a tree. Of course it's distributed by nature, allowing
people to work offline.
- It's abstracted to completely hide the actual data model behind it, allowing for all kinds of things to be implemented on top.
- Commits probably need a nanosecond component for the timestamp, which can be added via custom header field.
- having recording all changes allows for perfect merging, both on the client or on the server, while keeping a natural audit log which makes it useful for mission critical
databases in business.
- Applications
- Can markdown be used as database so issue-trackers along with meta-data could just be markdown files which are mostly human-editable? Could user interfaces
be meta-data aware and just hide the meta-data chunks which are now editable in the GUI itself? Doing this would make conflicts easier to resolve than an
sqlite
database.
- A time tracker - simple data, very likely naturally conflict free, and interesting to see it in terms of teams or companies using it with maybe GitHub as Backing for authentication.
- How about supporting multiple different trackers, as in different remotes?
Shortcomings & Limitations
Please take a look at the SHORTCOMINGS.md file for details.
Credits
- itertools (MIT Licensed)
- We use the
izip! macro in code
- flate2 (MIT Licensed)
- We use the high-level
flate2 library to implement decompression and compression, which builds on the high-performance zlib-rs crate.
🙏 Special Thanks 🙏
At least for now this section is exclusive to highlight the incredible support that Josh Triplett has provided to me
in the form of advice, sponsorship and countless other benefits that were incredibly meaningful. Going full time with gitoxide would hardly have been
feasible without his involvement, and I couldn't be more grateful 😌.
License
This project is licensed under either of
at your option.
Fun facts
- Originally @Byron was really fascinated by this problem
and believes that with
gitoxide it will be possible to provide the fastest solution for it.
- @Byron has been absolutely blown away by
git from the first time he experienced git more than 13 years ago, and
tried to implement it in various shapes and forms
multiple times. Now with Rust @Byron finally feels to have found the right tool for the job!
gitoxide（gix）是用纯 Rust 实现的 Git，既提供库，也提供一组用于操作 Git 仓库的命令行工具。