Quick Clone

A small cli tool to search and clone git repositories from the terminal (currently only Gitlab-v4 endpoints).

Disclaimer

This is a personal "for-fun" project. It was only tested on my machine and configured to my liking. It is my first "real" c++ and tui project (which is pretty obvious when looking into the code) so please consider this before doing anything.

If the tool does not work and/or you want another quick solution, have a look at the side-note for a bash script with most functionalities.

Usage

Run the qc command. This will open up the interactive TUI (on first run, the basic config will be generated).

Example

Views

• Query-Prompt (starting position)
  • UP/DOWN select between different git endpoints (provided by config file)
  • TYPE in prompt to set search query (pre-filter of endpoint)
    • Empty search: get repositories with newest activity
  • ENTER send request to selected git endpoint
    • Nothing found: continue on Query-Prompt
    • Something found: automatic switch to Filter-Prompt
• Filter-Prompt
  • UP/DOWN select repository
  • TYPE in prompt to filter search result
  • ENTER clone selected repository and terminate app
  • LEFT/RIGHT switch between prompts

Setup

Either download the newest AppImage (see Releases) and run it or compile the repo manually and run it.

AppImage

• Download the Appimage on the Releases page
• Make it executable chmod +x <file>
  • For systems that can not run it (Windows: WSL)
    • WARNING for some reason only some AppImages work (for WSL), mainly the ones created manually (tagged with *-manual), if the newest version does not have one, check older versions/releases open an Issue or compile on your computer
  • Extract it with ./<file> --appimage-extract
  • Run the executable in ./squashfs-root/usr/bin/qc
• Run it

General

• Currently there is no pre-compiled binaries (ignoring appimage)
  • To install: have the needed dependencies and compile the tool on your machine
• On first run, the application will create (if not already existing) the following:
  • Folders for ~/.config/quick-clone/
  • Config file ~/.config/quick-clone/config.json
  • Add example data to the config file
    • Only the official gitlab repo works for testing the rest are just example data that will not work

Config

• Add access token in Gitlab with (at least) API-read permissions
  • Can be found in your personal settings under "Access Tokens"
• (Create) Update config file at ~/.config/quick-clone/config.json (names etc. might change)
  • An array structure is used, for the purpose of having multiple git endpoints
  • Every element is an objcet inside the array [{...}, {...}, ...] with the following
    • name - Will be shown in the app to identify the selected endpoint
    • access_token - Is needed to have access to the endpoint, needs at least read access
    • url - URI to the Gitlab endpoint

Example

[
  {
    "name": "Work Gitlab",
    "access_token": "work-token",
    "url": "https://git.workplace.com/api/v4/projects"
  },
  {
    "name": "Personal Gitlab",
    "access_token": "personal-token",
    "url": "https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects"
  }
]

Side-note

The first version of this tool was a simple bash script, which uses different tools like fzf, jq, awk, curl and maybe others.

This should work on most machine that supports bash and the other tools and can be found in my dotfiles.

Dependencies

• ncurses e.g. apt install libncurses5-dev libncursesw5-dev
• libcurl e.g. apt install libcurl4-openssl-dev
• nlohmann/json3 e.g. apt install nlohmann-json3-dev

Commands

# generate Makefile in build/
$ cmake -S . -B build/
# for older versions of cmake
$ cd build/ && cmake .. && cd ..

# compile executable (binary can be found in ./build/bin/qc)
$ make -C build/

# format repository
$ clang-format -i --style=Google src/**/*.cpp src/**/*.h

# generate appimage
# when doing manual, do not forget to setup the wanted version in the script (CI/CD does it automatically)
$ ./generate/generate-appimage.sh

Development

Git commit

This project uses the standard of conventional commits.

The commits are also being used to generate the different releases via github actions, meaning no versions need to be updated manually.