vcs-repo-mgr 0.1

Version control repository manager

The Python package vcs-repo-mgr provides a command line program and Python API to perform common operations (in the context of packaging/deployment) on version control repositories. Currently only Mercurial and Git repositories are supported.

Usage

To get started you have to install the package and create a configuration file:

peter@macbook> pip install vcs-repo-mgr
peter@macbook> cat > ~/.vcs-repo-mgr.ini << EOF
[coloredlogs]
type = git
local = /tmp/coloredlogs
remote = [e-mail]:xolox/python-coloredlogs.git
EOF

Below are some examples of the command line interface. If you’re interested in using the Python API please refer to the online documentation.

Updating repositories

If the configuration file defines a local and remote repository and the local repository doesn’t exist yet it will be created the first time you update it:

peter@macbook> vcs-tool --repository coloredlogs --update
2014-05-04 18:55:54 INFO Creating Git clone of [e-mail]:xolox/python-coloredlogs.git at /tmp/coloredlogs ..
Cloning into bare repository '/tmp/coloredlogs'...
remote: Reusing existing pack: 96, done.
remote: Counting objects: 5, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (5/5), done.
remote: Total 101 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)
Receiving objects: 100% (101/101), 28.11 KiB, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (44/44), done.

Later runs will pull the latest changes instead of performing a full clone:

peter@macbook> vcs-tool --repository coloredlogs --update
2014-05-04 18:55:56 INFO Updating Git clone of [e-mail]:xolox/python-coloredlogs.git at /tmp/coloredlogs ..
From github.com:xolox/python-coloredlogs
 * branch HEAD -> FETCH_HEAD

Finding revision numbers/ids

Revision numbers are integer numbers that increment with every added revision. They’re very useful during packaging/deployment:

peter@macbook> vcs-tool --repository coloredlogs --revision master --find-revision-number
24

Revision ids (hashes) are hexadecimal strings that uniquely identify revisions. They are useful to unambiguously refer to a revision and its history (e.g while building a package you can embed the revision id as a hint about the origins of the package):

peter@macbook> vcs-tool --repository coloredlogs --revision master --find-revision-id
bce75c1eea88ebd40135cd45de716fe9591e348c

Exporting revisions

The repositories created by vcs-repo-mgr do not contain a working tree, just the version control files (in Git terminology this is called a “bare repository”). This has two reasons:

1. Bare repositories help conserve disk space. This is insignificant for small repositories, but on large repositories it can make a noticeable difference. Especially if you’re using a lot of them :-)

2. Bare repositories enforce the principle that the working tree shouldn’t be used during packaging (instead you should export the tree at a specific revision to a temporary directory and use that). This insistence on not using the working tree during packaging has two reasons:

   1. The working tree can contain files which are not under version control. Such files should certainly not be included in a package unintentionally.

   2. If the working tree of a repository is used, this makes it impossible to safely perform parallel builds from the same repository (the builds can corrupt each other’s working tree).

This means that if you want to do something with the files in the repository you have to export a revision to a (temporary) directory:

peter@macbook> vcs-tool --repository coloredlogs --export /tmp/coloredlogs-snapshot
2014-05-04 19:17:24 INFO Exporting revision master of /tmp/coloredlogs to /tmp/coloredlogs-snapshot ..

peter@macbook> ls -l /tmp/coloredlogs-snapshot
total 28K
drwxrwxr-x 2 peter peter 4.0K May  3 14:31 coloredlogs
drwxrwxr-x 3 peter peter 4.0K May  3 14:31 vim
-rw-rw-r-- 1 peter peter 1.1K May  3 14:31 LICENSE.txt
-rw-rw-r-- 1 peter peter   56 May  3 14:31 MANIFEST.in
-rw-rw-r-- 1 peter peter 5.4K May  3 14:31 README.rst
-rwxrwxr-x 1 peter peter 1.1K May  3 14:31 setup.py

Contact

The latest version of vcs-repo-mgr is available on PyPi and GitHub. For bug reports please create an issue on GitHub. If you have questions, suggestions, etc. feel free to send me an e-mail at [e-mail].

License

This software is licensed under the MIT license.

© 2014 Peter Odding.