dulwich/docs/recipes/index.txt

.. _recipes:

========================
Recipes for common tasks
========================

How do I check out files with Dulwich?
======================================

The answer depends on the exact meaning of "check out" that is
intended. There are several common goals it could be describing, and
correspondingly several options to achieve them.

Make sure a working tree on disk matches a particular commit (like ``git checkout``)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

:py:func:`dulwich.porcelain.checkout` is a very high-level function
that operates on the working tree and behaves very similar to the
``git checkout`` command. It packages a lot of functionality into a
single command, just as Git's porcelain does, which is useful when
matching Git's CLI is the goal, but might be less desirable for
programmatic access to a repository's contents.

Retrieve a single file's contents at a particular commit
--------------------------------------------------------

:py:func:`dulwich.object_store.tree_lookup_path` can a retrieve the
object SHA given its path and the SHA of a tree to look it up in. This
makes it very easy to access a specific file as stored in the
repo. Note that this function operates on *trees*, not *commits*
(every commit contains a tree for its contents, but a commit's ID is
not the same as its tree's ID).

With the retrieved SHA it's possible to get a file's blob directly
from the repository's object store, and thus its content bytes. It's
also possible to write it out to disk, using
:py:func:`dulwich.index.build_file_from_blob`, which takes care of
things like symlinks and file permissions.

.. code-block:: python

    from dulwich.repo import Repo
    from dulwich.objectspec import parse_commit
    from dulwich.object_store import tree_lookup_path

    repo = Repo("/path/to/some/repo")
    # parse_commit will understand most commonly-used types of Git refs, including
    # short SHAs, tag names, branch names, HEAD, etc.
    commit = parse_commit(repo, "v1.0.0")

    path = b"README.md"
    mode, sha = tree_lookup_path(repo.get_object, commit.tree, path)
    # Normalizer takes care of line ending conversion and applying smudge
    # filters during checkout. See the Git Book for more details:
    # https://git-scm.com/book/ms/v2/Customizing-Git-Git-Attributes
    blob = repo.get_blob_normalizer().checkout_normalize(repo[sha], path)

    print(f"The readme at {commit.id.decode('ascii')} is:")
    print(blob.data.decode("utf-8"))


Retrieve all or a subset of files at a particular commit
--------------------------------------------------------

A dedicated helper function
:py:func:`dulwich.object_store.iter_commit_contents` exists to
simplify the common requirement of programmatically getting the
contents of a repo as stored at a specific commit. Unlike
:py:func:`!porcelain.checkout`, it is not tied to a working tree, or
even files.

When paired with :py:func:`dulwich.index.build_file_from_blob`, it's
very easy to write out the retrieved files to an arbitrary location on
disk, independent of any working trees. This makes it ideal for tasks
such as retrieving a pristine copy of the contained files without any
of Git's tracking information, for use in deployments, automation, and
similar.

.. code-block:: python

    import stat
    from pathlib import Path

    from dulwich.repo import Repo
    from dulwich.object_store import iter_commit_contents
    from dulwich.index import build_file_from_blob

    repo = Repo("/path/to/another/repo")
    normalize = repo.get_blob_normalizer().checkout_normalize
    commit = repo[repo.head()]
    encoding = commit.encoding or "utf-8"

    # Scan the repo at current HEAD. Retrieve all files marked as
    # executable under bin/ and write them to disk
    for entry in iter_commit_contents(repo, commit.id, include=[b"bin"]):
        if entry.mode & stat.S_IXUSR:
            # Strip the leading bin/ from returned paths, write to
            # current directory
            path = Path(entry.path.decode(encoding)).relative_to("bin/")
            # Make sure the target directory exists
            path.parent.mkdir(parents=True, exist_ok=True)

            blob = normalize(repo[entry.sha], entry.path)
            build_file_from_blob(
                blob, entry.mode,
                str(path)
            )
            print(f"Wrote executable {path}")