GRM — Git Repository Manager

GRM helps you manage git repositories in a declarative way. Configure your repositories in a TOML file, GRM does the rest.

Quickstart

See the example configuration to get a feel for the way you configure your repositories.

Install

$ cargo install --git https://github.com/hakoerber/git-repo-manager.git --branch master

Get the example configuration

$ curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSfO https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hakoerber/git-repo-manager/master/example.config.toml

Run it!

$ grm sync --config example.config.toml
[⚙] Cloning into "/home/me/projects/git-repo-manager" from "https://code.hkoerber.de/hannes/git-repo-manager.git"
[✔] git-repo-manager: Repository successfully cloned
[⚙] git-repo-manager: Setting up new remote "github" to "https://github.com/hakoerber/git-repo-manager.git"
[✔] git-repo-manager: OK
[⚙] Cloning into "/home/me/projects/dotfiles" from "https://github.com/hakoerber/dotfiles.git"
[✔] dotfiles: Repository successfully cloned
[✔] dotfiles: OK

If you run it again, it will report no changes:

$ grm sync --config example.config.toml
[✔] git-repo-manager: OK
[✔] dotfiles: OK

Generate your own configuration

Now, if you already have a few repositories, it would be quite laborious to write a configuration from scratch. Luckily, GRM has a way to generate a configuration from an existing file tree:

$ grm find ~/your/project/root > config.toml

This will detect all repositories and remotes and write them to config.toml.

Show the state of your projects

$ grm status --config example.config.toml
+------------------+------------+----------------------------------+--------+---------+
| Repo             | Status     | Branches                         | HEAD   | Remotes |
+=====================================================================================+
| git-repo-manager |            | branch: master <origin/master> ✔ | master | github  |
|                  |            |                                  |        | origin  |
|------------------+------------+----------------------------------+--------+---------|
| dotfiles         | No changes | branch: master <origin/master> ✔ | master | origin  |
+------------------+------------+----------------------------------+--------+---------+

You can also use status without --config to check the current directory:

$ cd ./dotfiles
$ grm status
+----------+------------+----------------------------------+--------+---------+
| Repo     | Status     | Branches                         | HEAD   | Remotes |
+=============================================================================+
| dotfiles | No changes | branch: master <origin/master> ✔ | master | origin  |
+----------+------------+----------------------------------+--------+---------+

Manage worktrees for projects

Optionally, GRM can also set up a repository to support multiple worktrees. See the git documentation for details about worktrees. Long story short: Worktrees allow you to have multiple independent checkouts of the same repository in different directories, backed by a single git repository.

To use this, specify worktree_setup = true for a repo in your configuration. After the sync, you will see that the target directory is empty. Actually, the repository was bare-cloned into a hidden directory: .git-main-working-tree. Don't touch it! GRM provides a command to manage working trees.

Use grm worktree add <name> to create a new checkout of a new branch into a subdirectory. An example:

$ grm worktree add mybranch
$ cd ./mybranch
$ git status
On branch mybranch

nothing to commit, working tree clean

If you're done with your worktree, use grm worktree delete <name> to remove it. GRM will refuse to delete worktrees that contain uncommitted or unpushed changes, otherwise you might lose work.

Why?

I have a lot of repositories on my machines. My own stuff, forks, quick clones of other's repositories, projects that never went anywhere ... In short, I lost overview.

To sync these repositories between machines, I've been using Nextcloud. The thing is, Nextcloud is not too happy about too many small files that change all the time, like the files inside .git. Git also assumes that those files are updated as atomically as possible. Nextcloud cannot guarantee that, so when I do a git status during a sync, something blows up. And resolving these conflicts is just no fun ...

In the end, I think that git repos just don't belong into something like Nextcloud. Git is already managing the content & versions, so there is no point in having another tool do the same. But of course, setting up all those repositories from scratch on a new machine is too much hassle. What if there was a way to clone all those repos in a single command?

Also, I once transferred the domain of my personal git server. I updated a few remotes manually, but I still stumble upon old, stale remotes in projects that I haven't touched in a while. What if there was a way to update all those remotes in once place?

This is how GRM came to be. I'm a fan of infrastructure-as-code, and GRM is a bit like Terraform for your local git repositories. Write a config, run the tool, and your repos are ready. The only thing that is tracked by git it the list of repositories itself.

Future & Ideas

• Operations over all repos (e.g. pull)
• Show status of managed repositories (dirty, compare to remotes, ...)

Optional Features

• Support multiple file formats (YAML, JSON).
• Add systemd timer unit to run regular syncs

Dev Notes

It requires nightly features due to the usage of std::path::Path::is_symlink(). See the tracking issue.

Crates

• toml for the configuration file
• serde because we're using Rust, after all
• git2, a safe wrapper around libgit2, for all git operations
• clap, console and shellexpand for good UX

Links

• crates.io