How to unshallow repo?

[klarkc]

Hello, I need to define a variable at build time that depends on git describe which depends on git history, but it seems the repo in vercel build enviroment is a shallow clone with only few last commits. I tried to run a git fetch before build command with no luck:

git fetch --depth=100 --tags; SENTRY_RELEASE=$(git describe) yarn build

fatal: No names found, cannot describe anything.

I've also tried with git fetch --unshallow, git fetch --prune --unshallow and git fetch --prune --unshallow --tags.

In my local tests, replicating git clone --depth=2, the fetch with --depth option is working (even without --tags, because tags comes along commits)

[badazz91]

Hello, I have the same issue with integrating Chromatic into the build step of vercel.

14:42:10.542	> chromatic --project-token=$CHROMATIC_PROJECT_TOKEN --exit-zero-on-changes
14:42:12.144	Chromatic CLI v5.6.1
14:42:12.144	https://www.chromatic.com/docs/cli
14:42:12.161	Authenticating with Chromatic
14:42:12.162	→ Connecting to https://index.chromatic.com
14:42:12.497	Authenticated with Chromatic
14:42:12.497	→ Using project token '********d282'
14:42:12.498	Retrieving git information
14:42:12.529	→ ✖ Found only one commit
14:42:12.529	This typically means you've checked out a shallow copy of the Git repository, which some CI systems do by default.
14:42:12.529	In order for Chromatic to correctly determine baseline commits, we need access to the full Git history graph.
14:42:12.529	Refer to your CI provider's documentation for details.
14:42:12.533	✖ Failed to retrieve git information
14:42:12.533	✖ Found only one commit

Is there a way to change the vercel configration, so that the repo is checked out in an unshallow way?

[badazz91]

@klarkc I also raised the issue with the Vercel support - here the answer:

[...]

Thank you for reaching out,

I looked into your issue and it turns out that there is indeed a limit to the git history that Vercel accesses.

We just clone the repo with the parameter depth=2 and it is not possible to change that. Here is a little more info on the matter.

[...]

[klarkc]

Still... Why the git fetch --depth is not working? When I do a git clone with depth 2, then git fetch --depth it download the history, fetching more commits, but in vercel enviroment this somehow don't happens.

[graup]

Bump

Related topic: https://github.com/vercel/vercel/discussions/7093

[Styren]

Is there any way (hacky or not) to manually unshallow a repo? It's just so powerful to get access to the history during build stage, we could for example embed the publishing date of an article by just looking at its first revision.

[jontyk]

@amyegan I have just tested and confirmed that the above works, as simple as this for a Docusaurus2 site.

[brycewray]

In essence, the choice goes like this:

• Publish to Vercel via the Vercel GUI and get whatever benefits config (vercel.json) provides — e.g., control over Cache-Control and other headers — but you can’t control fetch-depth.
• Publish to Vercel via a GitHub Action and get your desired fetch-depth, but vercel.json obviously gets ignored and you thus lose what it gave you.

Not pretty. I guess if you’re using Next.js you have other options, but not otherwise.

[jontyk]

Is that necessarily true @brycewray? I am using rewrites via the vercel.json file with no ill effects caused by using the Build Output API via Github actions afaik.

[brycewray]

@jontyk It may depend on the use case, of course. In my case, I was building a Hugo site (with an all-npm workflow, using Hugo Installer, in case that matters). Since all the repo-cloning building took place within GH and the results then were presented to Vercel using deploy-to-vercel-action, the Vercel system would — I presume — have no opportunity to “see” vercel.json. At least, the results didn’t show that to be the case; the deploy was fine but the headers I specified in vercel.json weren’t there.

Here is the action I used, for reference (I have removed some comments, for easier reading):

name: Deploy to Vercel

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main

jobs:
  deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    permissions:
      contents: read
      deployments: write
    steps:
      - name: Checkout default branch
        uses: actions/checkout@v3
        with:
          fetch-depth: 0
          # Fetch **all** history (not just deploy commit) for Hugo's .GitInfo and .Lastmod
          # See https://discourse.gohugo.io/t/problems-with-gitinfo-in-ci/22480
      - name: Use Node.js
        uses: actions/setup-node@v3
        with:
          node-version: '18'
      - name: Install packages
        run: npm install
      - name: Build site with Hugo
        run: npm run build
      - name: Move "excerpts" feed (RSS/Atom only)
        run: mv public/posts/index.xml public/index-excerpts.xml
      - name: Run Pagefind
        run: npm run search
      - name: Publish to Vercel
        uses: BetaHuhn/deploy-to-vercel-action@v1
        with:
          VERCEL_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.VERCEL_TOKEN_STATIC_SITE }}
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          VERCEL_ORG_ID: ${{ secrets.VERCEL_ORG_ID}}
          VERCEL_PROJECT_ID: ${{ secrets.VERCEL_PROJECT_ID}}
          WORKING_DIRECTORY: 'public'

[brycewray]

I was later advised that the way around this was to put the vercel.json file in the Hugo project’s /static directory, thus enabling the Publish to Vercel step to detect it.

[Fryuni]

Still... Why the git fetch --depth is not working? When I do a git clone with depth 2, then git fetch --depth it download the history, fetching more commits, but in vercel enviroment this somehow don't happens.

Vercel doesn't just make a clone with --depth=10 they do a custom clone such that there is no remote configured.

To unshallow you can do this:

git pull --unshallow {YOUR REPO HTTP CLONE URL} "master:${PUBLIC_VERCEL_GIT_COMMIT_REF}"

The last step is not changing the head, it starts pointing to the correct commit already, it is just for git to recompute it from a full history instead of a history with a depth of 10.

To config that you got your commits you can run git rev-list --count HEAD before and after those commands. Running before should show 10 or less, running after should show the number of commits in the tree connected to the branch.

I haven't tested this for private repos, so I'm not sure if whatever Vercel uses to authenticate their clone of a private repo will work on normal git, but for public repos it is working fine.

Example of how I did this on my blog: https://gitlab.com/Fryuni/blog/-/commit/3719380d11b2b7f752e92ac55f3a6ad4ac3d6ed8

Edit: Found a simpler command

[souporserious]

You can configure Vercel to clone the full repo by setting the VERCEL_DEEP_CLONE environment variable to true. I wasn't able to find official documentation for this, but instead found this while looking through the Nextra codebase here which I can confirm works.

[Kamaropoulos]

All I'm getting is There was a permanent problem cloning the repo.

[souporserious]

Interesting, I haven't seen this yet. Is your repo history is large? The projects I've used this on are around 1,000 commits.