Frozen mode

🤔 This project works but the development is frozen, do not expect a lot submitting issues or PRs. 🤔

Git Externals

git-externals is a command line tool that helps you throw SVN away and migrate to Git for projects that make heavy use of svn:externals. In some cases it's just impossible to use Git submodules or subtrees to emulate SVN externals, because they aren't as flexible as SVN externals. For example SVN lets you handle a single file dependency through SVN external, whereas Git doesn't.

On Windows this requires ADMIN PRIVILEGES, because under the hood it uses symlinks. For the same reason this script is not meant to be used with the old Windows XP.

How to Install

$ pip install https://github.com/develersrl/git-externals/archive/master.zip

Usage:

Content of git_externals.json

Once your main project repository is handled by Git, git-externals expects to find a file called git_externals.json at the project root. Here is how to fill it:

Let's take an hypothetical project A, under Subversion, having 2 dependencies, B and C, declared as svn:externals as follows.

$ svn propget svn:externals .
^/svn/libraries/B lib/B
^/svn/libraries/C src/C

A
├── lib
│   └── B
└── src
    └── C

Once A, B and C have all been migrated over different Git repositories, fill git_externals.json by running the following commands. They describe, for each dependency, its remote location, and the destination directory, relative to the project root. Check out all the possibilities by running git externals add --help.

$ git externals add --branch=master git@github.com:username/libB.git . lib/B
$ git externals add --branch=master git@github.com:username/libC.git . src/C

This is now the content of git_externals.json:

{
    "git@github.com:username/libB.git": {
        "branch": "master",
        "ref": null,
        "targets": {
            "./": [
                "lib/B"
            ]
        }
    },
    "git@github.com:username/libC.git": {
        "branch": "master",
        "ref": null,
        "targets": {
            "./": [
                "src/C"
            ]
        }
    }
}

Git externals update

If you want to:

• download the externals of a freshly cloned Git repository and creates their symlinks, in order to have the wanted directory layout.
• checkout the latest version of all externals (as defined in git_externals.json file)

Run:

$ git externals update

Git externals status

$ git externals status [--porcelain|--verbose]
$ git externals status [--porcelain|--verbose] [external1 [external2] ...]

Shows the working tree status of one, multiple, or all externals:

• add --verbose if you are also interested to see the externals that haven't been modified
• add --porcelain if you want the output easily parsable (for non-humans).

$ git externals status
$ git externals status deploy
$ git externals status deploy qtwidgets

Git externals foreach

$ git externals foreach [--] cmd [arg1 [arg2] ...]

Evaluates an arbitrary shell command in each checked out external.

$ git externals foreach git fetch

Note: If some arguments of the shell command starts with --, like in git rev-parse --all, you must pass -- after foreach in order to stop git externals argument processing, example:

$ git externals foreach -- git rev-parse --all

Example usage

$ git externals add --branch=master https://github.com/username/projectA.git shared/ foo
$ git externals add --branch=master https://github.com/username/projectB.git shared/ bar
$ git externals add --branch=master https://github.com/username/projectC.git README.md baz/README.md
$ git externals add --tag=v4.4 https://github.com/torvalds/linux.git Makefile Makefile
$ git add git_externals.json
$ git commit -m "Let git-externals handle our externals ;-)"
$ git externals update
$ git externals diff
$ git externals info
$ git externals list
$ git externals foreach -- git diff HEAD~1

Note: Append / to the source path if it represents a directory.

Bash command-line completion

See installation instructions in gitext.completion.bash.