dulwich/README.rst

Dulwich
=======

This is the Dulwich project.

It aims to provide an interface to git repos (both local and remote) that
doesn't call out to git directly but instead uses pure Python.

**Main website**: <https://www.dulwich.io/>

**License**: Apache License, version 2 or GNU General Public License, version 2 or later.

SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0 OR GPL-2.0-or-later

The project is named after the part of London that Mr. and Mrs. Git live in
the particular Monty Python sketch.

Differences with other Python Git libraries
-------------------------------------------

Unlike other Python Git libraries, Dulwich is available as a standalone
package that doesn't depend on git (like GitPython) being installed or any
native code (like pygit2).

This comes at the cost of speed, but makes it easier to deploy in environments
where git isn't available or where it's important to have a pure Python
implementation.

To improve performance, Dulwich includes optional Rust bindings that can be
used to speed up low-level operations.

Installation
------------

By default, Dulwich' setup.py will attempt to build and install the optional Rust
extensions. The reason for this is that they significantly improve the performance
since some low-level operations that are executed often are much slower in CPython.

If you don't want to install the Rust bindings, specify the --pure argument to setup.py::

    $ python setup.py --pure install

or if you are installing from pip::

    $ pip install --no-binary dulwich dulwich --config-settings "--build-option=--pure"

Note that you can also specify --build-option in a
`requirements.txt <https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/reference/requirement-specifiers/>`_
file, e.g. like this::

    dulwich --config-settings "--build-option=--pure"

Getting started
---------------

Dulwich comes with both a lower-level API and higher-level plumbing ("porcelain").

For example, to use the lower level API to access the commit message of the
last commit::

    >>> from dulwich.repo import Repo
    >>> r = Repo('.')
    >>> r.head()
    '57fbe010446356833a6ad1600059d80b1e731e15'
    >>> c = r[r.head()]
    >>> c
    <Commit 015fc1267258458901a94d228e39f0a378370466>
    >>> c.message
    'Add note about encoding.\n'

And to print it using porcelain::

    >>> from dulwich import porcelain
    >>> porcelain.log('.', max_entries=1)
    --------------------------------------------------
    commit: 57fbe010446356833a6ad1600059d80b1e731e15
    Author: Jelmer Vernooij <jelmer@jelmer.uk>
    Date:   Sat Apr 29 2017 23:57:34 +0000

    Add note about encoding.

Further documentation
---------------------

The dulwich documentation can be found in docs/ and built by running ``make
doc``. It can also be found `on the web <https://www.dulwich.io/docs/>`_.

Help
----

There is a *#dulwich* IRC channel on the `OFTC <https://www.oftc.net/>`_, and
a `dulwich-discuss <https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/dulwich-discuss>`_
mailing list.

Contributing
------------

For a full list of contributors, see the git logs or `AUTHORS <AUTHORS>`_.

If you'd like to contribute to Dulwich, see the `CONTRIBUTING <CONTRIBUTING.rst>`_
file and `list of open issues <https://github.com/dulwich/dulwich/issues>`_.

Supported versions of Python
----------------------------

At the moment, Dulwich supports (and is tested on) CPython 3.9 and later and
Pypy.