Grit

1 Overview

Grit is a simple and light-weight git repository manager or git-compatible digital asset management system with limited remote object proxying, a http back-end and easy to use command line, python and cli user interfaces.

This is early prototype code, is missing many important features and probably won't work for you.

1.1 Features

• Python WSGI "Smart HTTP" server
• Limited remote object proxying
• Stream blob data from remote repositories
• Hierarchical repos with top-down inheritance
• Check out individual blobs
• Python and HTTP+JSON read/write API
• Supports a centralized workflow
• Command line, Python and web UIs
• Git not required

1.2 Known Issues

Known issues as of this release:

• Currently no support for diff, status, submodule or tag
• Poor performance with large binary files
• Can only checkout repos and blobs, not trees

1.3 Requirements

• Python (2.6.5)
• Dulwich (0.7.0)
• Git (optional)

1.4 Noted differences from git

• A branch in grit is different from a branch in git in that a branch is a child of a repo and inherits its files automatically. Files can be overwritten at the branch level.
• Grit supports (limited) remote object proxying, so you can browse and get information about an object without checking it out.
• Checkouts in grit are different in that you can check out a given version (latest by default) of a repo, or a single file.

2 Installation

$ pip install grit

or, download the source and

$ sudo python setup.py install

2.1 Environment Variables

The following environment variables are used, but not required.

GRIT_LOG_LEVEL     logging level (default is 20)
GRIT_SERVER_PORT   default port to run the grit server on (default is 8080)
GRIT_STATIC_DIR    filesystem location for serving web UI elements

3 Basic Usage

grit COMMAND [OPTIONS]

Commands:

new     make new repo at url
co      check out files from repo at url
ci      check in files to repo at url
serve   serve a repo or directory of repos

Create a new repo

The “new” command creates the equivalent of a bare git repository. This “projects” repo will act as a starting point for creating branches later.

$ grit new /tmp/projects

Using the Python API

>>> from grit import Repo
>>> r = Repo.new('/var/tmp/myrepo')
>>> r
<grit.Repo "/var/tmp/myrepo">
>>> r.name
'myrepo'
>>> r.items()
[]

Serving repos

Start the grit server on localhost port 80 and serve the “projects” repository.

$ grit serve /tmp/projects -p 80

Creating branches

Let’s branch some repositories off of the main “projects” repository. You can use either URLs or local paths here.

$ grit new http://localhost/animal
$ grit new http://localhost/animal/mammal
$ grit new http://localhost/animal/mammal/wolf

To override any files inherited from a branch parent, simply check in a file to the branch with the same name. To get thumbnails in the web UI, check in an appropriate png file called “thumb.png”.

Adding files

Currently, adding files is only supported on local repositories using grit or git itself. This is a known issue and will be addressed in a near future release. Let’s check out the “wolf” branch with git and add a file called “thumb.png”. You can also use the Python API to do this using the addItem method.

Using grit

$ grit ci /tmp/projects/animal/mammal/wolf thumb.png

Using git

$ git clone http://localhost/animal/mammal/wolf
$ cd wolf
$ git add thumb.png
$ git commit thumb.png "adding thumb"
$ git push

Using the Python API

>>> from grit import Repo, Item
>>> r = Repo('/tmp/projects/animal/mammal/wolf')
>>> v = r.addVersion()
>>> i = Item.from_path(repo=r, path='/path/to/thumb.png')
>>> v.addItem(i)
>>> v.save('Publishing thumbnail')
>>> v.items()
[<grit.Item "thumb.png">]
>>> r.versions()
[<grit.Version "0">, <grit.Version "1">]

Checking out repos

You can use grit to checkout the latest version of a repo (with revision depth=0), including all of the automatically inherited files from its branch parents.

$ grit co http://localhost/animal/mammal/wolf

Checking out files

Also with grit, you can check out a single file if you wish.

$ grit co http://localhost/animal/mammal/wolf/thumb.png

4 License

See file named LICENSE for license terms governing over the entire project.

Some, explisitely labeled so constituent files/works are licensed under separate, more-permissive terms. See disclaimers at the start of the files for details.