git-fs

git-fs is a filesystem interface to git repositories.

Past and current versions can be accessed without a checkout. Heads, tags, branches, reflogs, commits and worktrees provide various means of naming and accessing files.

Use cases

You can try these on the git.git repository.

Compute repository statistics

How much code in the first major release?

git fs
cd .git/fs/tags/v1.0.0/worktree
ohcount # A sloccount alternative

Display the latest html docs

git fs; cd .git/fs
firefox remotes/origin/html/worktree/index.html

Jump to a commit using its SHA1

git fs; cd .git/fs
cd commits/902f235378cb2b2f6dd5dd664b9630c95321f0ae

etc.

• Restore from backup (bup, gibak)
• Look at previous conffiles stored in etckeeper
• Look at wiki pages stored by ikiwiki or gh-pages
• Serve repository snapshots using a standard webserver.

Build instructions

git-fs depends on FUSE and some OCaml libraries. It has been tested on Debian, Ubuntu, and ArchLinux.

Get the dependencies:

sudo apt-get install omake libfuse-dev camlidl libpcre-ocaml-dev libbatteries-ocaml-dev  # Ubuntu
sudo aptitude install omake libfuse-dev camlidl libpcre-ocaml-dev libbatteries-ocaml-dev  # Debian
sudo pacman -S omake ocamlfuse-cvs pcre-ocaml ocaml-batteries  # Arch
sudo yum install fuse-devel ocaml-pcre-devel ocaml-findlib-devel ocaml-camomile ocaml-camlidl ocaml-bisect ocaml-ounit ocaml-ocamldoc  # Fedora

Build:

git submodule update --init
make -C deps/ocamlfuse/lib || make -C deps/ocamlfuse/lib byte-code-library
omake

Install (~/bin must be in your path):

ln -s ~+/git-fs -t ~/bin

Usage

The first step is to mount the filesystem.

git fs

Then, either browse it

cd .git/fs/HEAD/worktree
cat README

Or use a few special commands

git fs mtab
git fs umount
git fs help

Debugging

MALLOC_CHECK_=3 debug/git-fs debug 2>&1 |tee -a debug.log