legitfs 0.2

A read-only FUSE-based filesystem allowing you to browse git repositories

legit is a FUSE-filesystem that mounts any number of git repositories read only, allowing direct access to all commits and their files through a directory structure.

legit is read-only, unless there are catastrophic bugs in the software, it should not touch your data in any way.

Installation (from PyPI)

Assuming your have virtualenvwrapper installed:

$ mkvirtualenv legitfs
$ pip install legitfs

Installation (without PyPI)

legit requires the FUSE python bindings, usually these are available (and most often already installed) through your distro. The correct package on PyPI is named fuse-python.

In addition, a somewhat recent version of dulwich is required. Install it through your distro or via PyPI.

The program itself is just a single file. Download it to anywhere in your path and run it.

If you have the watchdog package installed, legit will automatically refresh the filesystem-contents when you add, update or remove repositories.

Usage example

Let’s try it! In an empty directory, type:

$ git clone git://github.com/mbr/simplekv.git
$ git clone git://github.com/mitsuhiko/flask.git

That will clone two git repositories for us to play around with. Now create a mountpoint somewhere

$ mkdir /tmp/legitfs-test

Finally, we mount the current directory (and therefore its git repositories):

$ legitfs -o root=./ /tmp/legitfs-test

Done! Now let’s see what we’ve got:

$ ls /tmp/legitfs-test/
flask  simplekv

legitfs tries to recreate the directory-structure and also handles nested repositories or those that are in subdirectories. Of course, you can also mount just one repository at the root.

Some more interesting stuff:

$ ls /tmp/legitfs-test/flask/
commits  HEAD  refs
$ ls /tmp/legitfs-test/flask/refs/tags -l
total 48
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 4096  1. Jan 1970  0.1 -> ../../commits/8605cc310d260c3b08160881b09da26c2cc95f8d
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 4096  1. Jan 1970  0.2 -> ../../commits/e0fa5aec3a13d9c3e8e27b53526fcee56ac0298d
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 4096  1. Jan 1970  0.3 -> ../../commits/ce6e4cbd73d57cb8c1bba85c46490f71061f865f
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 4096  1. Jan 1970  0.3.1 -> ../../commits/6b3e616cf905fd19c37fca93d1198cad1490567b
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 4096  1. Jan 1970  0.4 -> ../../commits/1592c53a664c82d9badac81fa0104af226cce5a7
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 4096  1. Jan 1970  0.5 -> ../../commits/4c937be2524de0fddc2d2f7f39b09677497260aa
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 4096  1. Jan 1970  0.6 -> ../../commits/5cadd9d34da46b909f91a5379d41b90f258d5998
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 4096  1. Jan 1970  0.6.1 -> ../../commits/774b7f768214f5b0c125a1b80daa97247a0ac1a6
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 4096  1. Jan 1970  0.7 -> ../../commits/fb1482d3bb1b95803d25247479eb8ca8317a3219
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 4096  1. Jan 1970  0.7.1 -> ../../commits/9682d6b371d8c1ce1fd0e58424e836d27d2317b3
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 4096  1. Jan 1970  0.7.2 -> ../../commits/3f5db33ece48bd22b77fcc62553998ea9a6cfdfc
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 4096  1. Jan 1970  0.8 -> ../../commits/d5e10e4685f54dde5ffc27c4f55a19fb23f7a536

Each repository contains at least three files: commits contains directories, one for each commit, allowing you to access commits. HEAD is the current HEAD-ref and is, like all refs, a symlink. refs also works as you would expect and is full of symlinks.

Another feature are relative refs:

$ head -n5 /tmp/legitfs-test/flask/refs/tags/0.7~15/README

                          // Flask //

              web development, one drop at a time

Notice the ‘0.7~15’, which is git-speak for “tag 0.7, then go 15 revisions back”. While these virtual “files” aren’t shown when you ls the refs/tags directory, you can append any number of ~n or ^ to any ref to go back commits.

What’s missing

• Optimizations for when the tree needs to be rebuilt.

• Submodules. I currently don’t use any and haven’t tried them at all.

• Currently, each file is read into memory completely (since I haven’t been able to find a streaming-api for blobs in dulwich yet), so working on large files might not be feasible at the moment. Unless you have a lot of RAM.

Is it legit?

Completely.