git-pulsar 0.14.0

Automated, paranoid git backups for students and casual coding.

🔭 Git Pulsar (v0.14.0)

Fault-tolerant state capture for distributed development.

Standard git commit conflates two distinct actions: saving your work (frequency: high, noise: high) and publishing a feature (frequency: low, signal: high).

Git Pulsar decouples them. It is a background daemon that provides high-frequency, out-of-band state capture, ensuring your work is immutable and recoverable without polluting your project history.

📡 The Mission: Decoupling Signal from Noise

In a typical workflow, developers are forced to make "WIP" commits just to switch machines or save their progress. This introduces entropy into the commit log, requiring complex interactive rebases to clean up later.

Git Pulsar treats the working directory state as a continuous stream of data. It captures this "noise" in a dedicated namespace (refs/heads/wip/...), keeping your primary branch purely focused on "signal" (logical units of work).

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⚙️ Engineering Philosophy: Non-Blocking Determinism

This system is designed to operate safely alongside standard Git commands without race conditions or index locking.

1. Out-of-Band Indexing (The "Shadow" Index)

Most autosave tools aggressively run git add ., which destroys the user's carefully staged partial commits.

• The Invariant: The user's .git/index must never be touched by the daemon.
• The Implementation: Pulsar sets the GIT_INDEX_FILE environment variable to a temporary location (.git/pulsar_index). It constructs the tree object using low-level plumbing commands (git write-tree), bypassing the porcelain entirely. This ensures Zero-Interference with your active workflow.

2. Distributed State Reconciliation (The "Zipper" Graph)

In a distributed environment (Laptop ↔ Desktop), state drift is inevitable.

• The Mechanism: Pulsar maintains a separate refspec for each machine ID.
• The Topology: When you run git pulsar finalize, the engine performs an Octopus Merge, traversing the DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) of all machine streams and squashing them into a single, clean commit on main.

3. Fault Tolerance

• The Problem: Laptops die. SSH connections drop.
• The Solution: By decoupling commits from pushes, Pulsar can capture local state every few minutes while conserving battery by pushing to the remote at a lower frequency (e.g., hourly). This guarantees that the Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR) is minimized regardless of network availability or hardware failure.

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⚡ Features

• Decoupled Cycles: Independent intervals for local commits and remote pushes. Save your battery while staying protected.
• Out-of-Band Indexing: Backups are stored in a configured namespace (default: refs/heads/wip/pulsar/...). Your git status, git branch, and git log remain completely clean.
• Distributed Sessions: Hop between machines. Pulsar tracks sessions per device and lets you sync to pick up exactly where you left off.
• Zero-Interference:
  • Uses a temporary index so it never messes up your partial git add.
  • Detects if you are rebasing or merging and waits for you to finish.
  • Prevents accidental upload of large binaries (configurable threshold).
• Cascading Config: Settings are merged from global defaults, ~/.config/git-pulsar/config.toml, and local pulsar.toml or pyproject.toml files.

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📦 Installation

macOS

Install via Homebrew. This automatically manages the background service.

brew tap jacksonfergusondev/tap
brew install git-pulsar
brew services start git-pulsar

Linux / Generic

Install via uv (or pipx) and use the built-in service manager to register the systemd timer.

uv tool install git-pulsar
# This generates and enables a systemd user timer
git pulsar install-service --interval 300

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🚀 The Pulsar Workflow

Pulsar is designed to feel like a native git command.

1. Initialize & Identify

Navigate to your project. The first time you run Pulsar, it will register the repo and start the background protection loop.

cd ~/University/Astro401
git pulsar

The daemon will now silently snapshot your work based on your configured intervals.

2. Configure Your Intensity

Need high-frequency protection for a critical project? Set a preset or fine-tune the intervals in your project root.

pulsar.toml

[daemon]
preset = "paranoid"  # 5min commits, 5min pushes

3. The "Session Handoff" (Sync)

You worked on your Desktop all night but forgot to push manually. You open your Laptop at class.

git pulsar sync

Pulsar checks the remote, finds the newer session from desktop, and fast-forwards your working directory to match it.

4. Restore a File

Mess up a script? Grab the version from your last shadow commit.

# Restore specific file from the latest shadow backup
git pulsar restore src/main.py

5. Finalize Your Work

When you are ready to submit or merge to main:

git pulsar finalize

This performs an Octopus Merge. It pulls the backup history from your Laptop, Desktop, and Lab PC, squashes them all together, and stages the result on main.

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🧬 Environment Bootstrap (macOS)

Pulsar includes a one-click scaffolding tool to set up a modern, robust Python environment.

git pulsar --env

This bootstraps the current directory with:

• uv: Initializes a project with fast package management and Python 3.12+ pinning.

• direnv: Creates an .envrc for auto-activating virtual environments and hooking into the shell.

• VS Code: Generates a .vscode/settings.json pre-configured to exclude build artifacts and use the local venv.

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🛠 Command Reference

Backup Management

Command	Description
git pulsar	Default. Registers the current repo and ensures the daemon is watching it.
git pulsar now	Force an immediate backup cycle (commit + push).
git pulsar sync	Pull the latest session from any machine to your current directory.
git pulsar restore <file>	Restore a specific file from the latest backup.
git pulsar diff	See what has changed since the last backup.
git pulsar finalize	Squash-merge all backup streams into main.

Repository Control

Command	Description
git pulsar status	Show detailed daemon state and repository-specific commit/push history.
git pulsar config	Open the global configuration file in your default editor.
git pulsar list	Show all watched repositories and their status.
git pulsar pause	Temporarily suspend backups for this repo.
git pulsar resume	Resume backups.
git pulsar remove	Stop tracking this repository entirely (keeps files).
git pulsar ignore <glob>	Add a pattern to .gitignore (and untrack it if needed).

Maintenance

Command	Description
git pulsar doctor	Run deep diagnostics (logs, stuck repos) and clean up the registry.
git pulsar prune	Delete old backup history (>30 days). Runs automatically weekly.
git pulsar log	View recent log history (last 1000 lines) and tail new entries.

Service

Command	Description
git pulsar install-service	Register the background daemon (LaunchAgent/Systemd).
git pulsar uninstall-service	Remove the background daemon.

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⚙️ Configuration

Settings cascade from Global → Local. Local list options (like ignore) append to global ones.

Options

Section	Key	Default	Description
daemon	preset	None	Use paranoid, aggressive, balanced, or lazy.
daemon	commit_interval	600	Seconds between local state captures.
daemon	push_interval	3600	Seconds between remote pushes.
limits	large_file_threshold	100MB	Max file size before aborting a backup.

Example ~/.config/git-pulsar/config.toml

[daemon]
preset = "balanced"
eco_mode_percent = 25  # Throttles pushes if battery is low

[files]
ignore = ["*.tmp", "node_modules/"]

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🗺 Roadmap

Phase 1: The "Co-Pilot" Update (High Interactivity)

Focus: Turning the tool from a blind script into a helpful partner that negotiates with you.

• Smart Restore: Replace hard failures on "dirty" files with a negotiation menu (Overwrite / View Diff / Cancel).
• Pre-Flight Checklists: Display a summary table of incoming changes (machines, timestamps, file counts) before running destructive commands like finalize.
• Active Doctor: Upgrade git pulsar doctor to not just diagnose issues (like stopped daemons), but offer to auto-fix them interactively.

Phase 2: "Deep Thought" (Context & Intelligence)

Focus: Leveraging data to make the tool feel alive and aware of your workflow.

• Semantic Shadow Logs: Replace generic "Shadow backup" messages with auto-generated summaries (e.g., backup: modified daemon.py (+15 lines)).
• Roaming Radar: Proactively detect if a different machine has pushed newer work to the same branch and notify the user to sync.
• Decaying Retention: Implement "Grandfather-Father-Son" pruning (keep all hourly backups for 24h, then daily summaries) to balance safety with disk space.

Phase 3: The "TUI" Experience (Visuals)

Focus: Making the invisible backup history tangible and explorable.

• Time Machine UI: A terminal-based visual browser for git pulsar restore that lets you scroll through file history and view side-by-side diffs.
• Universal Bootstrap: Expand git pulsar --env to support Linux (apt/dnf) environments alongside macOS.

Future Horizons

• Identity Sync: Automatically fetch used Machine IDs from the remote to prevent collisions when setting up a new device.
• End-to-End Encryption: Optional GPG encryption for shadow commits.
• Windows Support: Native support for PowerShell and Task Scheduler.

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🤝 Contributing

We welcome contributions! Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for details on how to set up the development environment, run tests, and submit pull requests.

📄 License

MIT © Jackson Ferguson