How to verify valid format of URL as a git repo?

Question

I do NOT want to check if the remote repository exists. I just want to test a string and return true if the string is in the valid format for a git repo.

I'm writing a groovy script and wish to do a quick check if a string represents a valid possible git repo.

For instance if the following strings are entered the test should return true:

http://example.com/my-project.git
file:///absolute/path/to/my-project.git
ssh:[email protected]:my-project
my-project

The following strings should fail the test and cause false to be returned:

fil://example.com/my-project.git
ssh:user|example.com:my-project

I'm hoping there is a git command that can do this quick test for me and I can call git from the groovy script. I say this because I'd like to use whatever is compiled into git to do the test as opposed to re-implementing the regular expression (or parser) that already exists in git. If I try the latter then inevitably I'll miss something.

Answer 1

It does seem that there is no way to accomplish this with git. The solution I finally used is

git ls-remote the-url-to-test

This returns zero on success and non-zero otherwise. This doesn't satisfy my original question since I don't want to check if the repo exists and is valid... but it does satisfy that the URL is valid if the repo also exists.

This will have to do for my current script.

Answer 2

This gets close to Using a regular expression to validate an email address, in that you'll be able to detect some errors but not all. Given that you'll have to cope with failure anyway (wrong hostnames, bad SSH credentials), you're basically putting a few heuristics in place to catch common errors. I don't believe there's any validation code you can borrow from Git for this, although the list of URL formats (Git URLs) should be helpful in implementing this yourself.