git-fastclone

git-fastclone

git-fastclone is git clone --recursive on steroids.

Why fastclone?

Doing lots of repeated checkouts on a specific machine?

Repository	1st Fastclone	2nd Fastclone	git clone	cp -R
angular.js	8s	3s	6s	0.5s
bootstrap	26s	3s	11s	0.2s
gradle	25s	9s	19s	6.2s
linux	4m 53s	1m 6s	3m 51s	29s
react.js	18s	3s	8s	0.5s
tensorflow	19s	4s	8s	1.5s

Above times captured using time without verbose mode.

What does it do?

It creates a reference repo with git clone --mirror in /var/tmp/git-fastclone/reference for each repository and git submodule linked in the main repo. You can control where it puts these by changing the REFERENCE_REPO_DIR environment variable.

It aggressively updates these mirrors from origin and then clones from the mirrors into the directory of your choosing. It always works recursively and multithreaded to get your checkout up as fast as possible.

Detailed explanation here.

Usage

gem install git-fastclone
git fastclone [options] <git-repo-url>

-b, --branch BRANCH              Checkout this branch rather than the default
-v, --verbose                    Verbose mode
    --print_git_errors           Print git output if a command fails
-c, --color                      Display colored output
    --config CONFIG              Git config applied to the cloned repo
    --lock-timeout N             Timeout in seconds to acquire a lock on any reference repo.
            Default is 0 which waits indefinitely.
    --pre-clone-hook command     An optional command that should be invoked before cloning mirror repo

Change the default REFERENCE_REPO_DIR environment variable if necessary.

Cygwin users need to add ~/bin to PATH.

Hooks

• pre-clone-hook is invoked right before cloning a new mirror repo, which gives a change to prepopulate git's mirror from a different source. The hook is invoked with given arguments:

1. cloning repo url
2. path to the repo mirror location
3. attempt number, 0-indexed

How to test?

Manual testing:

ruby -Ilib bin/git-fastclone <git url>

Compatible with Travis and Kochiku.

Contributing

If you would like to contribute to git-fastclone, you can fork the repository and send us pull requests.

When submitting code, please make every effort to follow existing conventions and style in order to keep the code as readable as possible.

Before accepting any pull requests, we need you to sign an Individual Contributor Agreement (Google form).

Once landed, please reach out to any owner listed in https://rubygems.org/gems/git-fastclone and ask them to help publish the new version.

Acknowledgements

• robolson
• ianchesal
• mtauraso
• chriseckhardt

License

Copyright 2015 Square Inc.

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at

    http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.