pygit2 is a set of Python bindings to the libgit2 linkable C Git library. The supported versions of Python are 2.6, 2.7, 3.1 and 3.2
Through this text Python 3 is used for the inline examples. Also, the Python 3 terminology is used (for instance we say text strings instead of unicode strings).
First you need to install the latest version of libgit2. You can find platform-specific instructions to build the library in the libgit2 website:
Also, make sure you have Python 2.6+ installed together with the Python development headers.
When those are installed, you can install pygit2:
$ git clone git://github.com/libgit2/pygit2.git
$ cd pygit2
$ python setup.py install
$ python setup.py test
pygit2 expects to find the libgit2 installed files in the directory specified in the LIBGIT2
environment variable.
In addition, make sure that libgit2 is build in "__cdecl" mode. The following recipe shows you how to do it, assuming you're working from a bash shell:
$ export LIBGIT2=C:/Dev/libgit2
$ git clone git://github.com/libgit2/libgit2.git
$ cd libgit2
$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake .. -DSTDCALL=OFF -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$LIBGIT2 -G "Visual Studio 9 2008"
$ cmake --build . --config release --target install
$ ctest -v
At this point, you're ready to execute the generic pygit2 installation steps described above.
Everything starts by opening an existing repository:
>>> from pygit2 import Repository
>>> repo = Repository('pygit2/.git')
Or by creating a new one:
>>> from pygit2 import init_repository
>>> bare = False
>>> repo = init_repository('test', bare)
These are the basic attributes of a repository:
Repository.path -- path to the Git repository
Repository.workdir -- path to the working directory, None in the case of
a bare repo
In the first place Git is a key-value storage system. The values stored are called objects, there are four types (commits, trees, blobs and tags), for each type pygit2 has a Python class:
# Get the last commit
>>> head = repo.head
# Show commits and trees
>>> commit
<pygit2.Commit object at 0x7f9d2f3000b0>
>>> commit.tree
<pygit2.Tree object at 0x7f9d2f3000f0>
These four classes (Commit
, Tree
, Blob
and Tag
) inherit from the Object
base class, which provides shared behaviour. A Git object is identified by a unique object id, which is a binary byte string; this is often represented as an hexadecimal text string:
>>> commit.oid
b'x\xde\xb5W\x8d\x01<\xdb\xdf\x08o\xa1\xd1\xa3\xe7\xd9\x82\xe8\x88\x8f'
>>> commit.hex
'78deb5578d013cdbdf086fa1d1a3e7d982e8888f'
The API of pygit2 accepts both the raw object id and its hexadecimal representation, the difference is done based on its type (a byte or a text string).
This is the common interface for all Git objects:
Object.type -- one of the GIT_OBJ_COMMIT, GIT_OBJ_TREE,
GIT_OBJ_BLOB or GIT_OBJ_TAG constants
Object.oid -- the object id, a byte string 20 bytes long
Object.hex -- hexadecimal representation of the object id, a text
string 40 chars long
Object.read_raw() -- returns the byte string with the raw contents of the
of the object
Objects can not be modified once they have been created.
A commit is a snapshot of the working dir with meta informations like author, committer and others.:
Commit.author -- the author of the commit
Commit.committer -- the committer of the commit
Commit.message -- the message, a text string
Commit.tree -- the tree object attached to the commit
Commit.parents -- the list of parent commits
The author and committer attributes of commit objects are Signature
objects:
>>> commit.author
<pygit2.Signature object at 0x7f75e9b1f5f8>
This is their interface:
Signature.name -- person's name
Signature.email -- person's email address
Signature.time -- unix time
Signature.offset -- offset from utc in minutes
Commits can be created by calling the create_commit
method of the repository with the following parameters:
>>> from time import time
>>> author = Signature('Alice Author', 'alice@authors.tld', time(), 0)
>>> committer = Signature('Cecil Committer', 'cecil@committers.tld', time(), 0)
>>> tree = repo.TreeBuilder().write()
>>> repo.create_commit(
... 'refs/heads/master', # the name of the reference to update
... author, committer, 'one line commit message\n\ndetailed commit message',
... tree, # binary string representing the tree object ID
... [] # list of binary strings representing parents of the new commit
... )
'#\xe4<u\xfe\xd6\x17\xa0\xe6\xa2\x8b\xb6\xdc35$\xcf-\x8b~'
A tree is a sorted collection of tree entries. It is similar to a folder or directory in a file system. Each entry points to another tree or a blob. A tree can be iterated, and partially implements the sequence and mapping interfaces:
# Number of entries
>>> tree = commit.tree
>>> len(tree)
6
# Iteration
>>> for entry in tree:
... print(entry.hex, entry.name)
...
7151ca7cd3e59f3eab19c485cfbf3cb30928d7fa .gitignore
c36f4cf1e38ec1bb9d9ad146ed572b89ecfc9f18 COPYING
32b30b90b062f66957d6790c3c155c289c34424e README.md
c87dae4094b3a6d10e08bc6c5ef1f55a7e448659 pygit2.c
85a67270a49ef16cdd3d328f06a3e4b459f09b27 setup.py
3d8985bbec338eb4d47c5b01b863ee89d044bd53 test
# Get an entry by name
>>> entry = tree['pygit2.c']
>>> entry
<pygit2.TreeEntry object at 0xcc10f0>
# Get the object the entry points to
>>> blob = repo[entry.oid]
>>> blob
<pygit2.Blob object at 0xcc12d0>
This is the interface of a tree entry:
TreeEntry.name -- name of the tree entry
TreeEntry.oid -- the id of the git object
TreeEntry.hex -- hexadecimal representation of the oid
TreeEntry.attributes -- the Unix file attributes
TreeEntry.to_object() -- returns the git object (equivalent to repo[entry.oid])
A diff shows the changes between trees, an index or the working dir:
# Diff two trees
>>> t0 = repo.head.tree
>>> t1 = repo.head.parents[0]
>>> diff = t0.diff(t1)
>>> diff
# Diff a tree with the index
>>> tree = repo.head.tree
>>> diff = tree.diff(repo.index)
# Diff a tree with the current working dir
>>> tree = repo.head.tree
>>> diff = tree.diff()
The interface for a diff:
Diff.changes -- Dict of 'files' and 'hunks' for every change
Diff.patch -- a patch for every changeset
Diff.merge -- Merge two Diffs
A blob is equivalent to a file in a file system.:
# create a blob out of memory
>>> oid = repo.create_blob('foo bar')
>>> blob = repo[oid]
Blob.data -- the contents of the blob, a byte string
A tag is a static label for a commit. See references for more information.
Reference lookup:
>>> all_refs = repo.listall_references()
>>> master_ref = repo.lookup_reference("refs/heads/master")
>>> commit = repo[master_ref.oid]
Reference log:
>>> head = repo.lookup_reference('refs/heads/master')
>>> for entry in head.log():
... print(entry.message)
The interface for RefLogEntry:
RefLogEntry.committer -- Signature of Committer
RefLogEntry.message -- the message of the RefLogEntry
RefLogEntry.oid_old -- oid of old reference
RefLogEntry.oid_new -- oid of new reference
You can iterate through the revision history with repo.walk:
>>> from pygit2 import GIT_SORT_TIME
>>> for commit in repo.walk(oid, GIT_SORT_TIME):
... print(commit.hex)
Index read:
>>> index = repo.index
>>> index.read()
>>> oid = index['path/to/file'].oid # from path to object id
>>> blob = repo[oid] # from object id to object
Iterate over all entries of the index:
>>> for entry in index:
... print entry.path, entry.hex
Index write:
>>> index.add('path/to/file') # git add
>>> del index['path/to/file'] # git rm
>>> index.write() # don't forget to save the changes
Inspect the status of the repository:
>>> from pygit2 import GIT_STATUS_CURRENT
>>> status = repo.status()
>>> for filepath, flags in status.items():
... if flags != GIT_STATUS_CURRENT:
... print "Filepath %s isn't clean" % filepath
Fork libgit2/pygit2 on GitHub, make it awesomer (preferably in a branch named for the topic), send a pull request.
See issues
The following people have contributed at least one patch to the pygit2 project (sorted alphabetically):
- Amit Bakshi
- András Veres-Szentkirályi
- Benjamin Kircher
- Bryan O'Sullivan
- Carlos Martín Nieto
- Christian Boos
- David Borowitz (Original author)
- David Versmisse
- Erik van Zijst
- Han-Wen Nienhuys
- Hugh Cole-Baker
- J David Ibáñez (Current maintainer)
- Jared Flatow
- John Szakmeister
- Josh Bleecher Snyder
- Julien Miotte
- Martin Lenders
- Nico von Geyso
- Petr Hosek
- Petr Viktorin
- Rui Abreu Ferreira
- Sarath Lakshman
- Sebastian Thiel
- Vicent Marti
- Yonggang Luo
- Zoran Zaric
- pistacchio
GPLv2 with linking exception. See COPYING for more details.