Python Git Module experiences? [closed]

Question

While this question was asked a while ago and I don't know the state of the libraries at that point, it is worth mentioning for searchers that GitPython does a good job of abstracting the command line tools so that you don't need to use subprocess. There are some useful built in abstractions that you can use, but for everything else you can do things like:

import git
repo = git.Repo( '/home/me/repodir' )
print repo.git.status()
# checkout and track a remote branch
print repo.git.checkout( 'origin/somebranch', b='somebranch' )
# add a file
print repo.git.add( 'somefile' )
# commit
print repo.git.commit( m='my commit message' )
# now we are one commit ahead
print repo.git.status()

Everything else in GitPython just makes it easier to navigate. I'm fairly well satisfied with this library and appreciate that it is a wrapper on the underlying git tools.

UPDATE: I've switched to using the sh module for not just git but most commandline utilities I need in python. To replicate the above I would do this instead:

import sh
git = sh.git.bake(_cwd='/home/me/repodir')
print git.status()
# checkout and track a remote branch
print git.checkout('-b', 'somebranch')
# add a file
print git.add('somefile')
# commit
print git.commit(m='my commit message')
# now we are one commit ahead
print git.status()

I thought I would answer my own question, since I'm taking a different path than suggested in the answers. Nonetheless, thanks to those who answered.

First, a brief synopsis of my experiences with GitPython, PyGit, and Dulwich:

• GitPython: After downloading, I got this imported and the appropriate object initialized. However, trying to do what was suggested in the tutorial led to errors. Lacking more documentation, I turned elsewhere.
• PyGit: This would not even import, and I could find no documentation.
• Dulwich: Seems to be the most promising (at least for what I wanted and saw). I made some progress with it, more than with GitPython, since its egg comes with Python source. However, after a while, I decided it may just be easier to try what I did.

Also, StGit looks interesting, but I would need the functionality extracted into a separate module and do not want wait for that to happen right now.

In (much) less time than I spent trying to get the three modules above working, I managed to get git commands working via the subprocess module, e.g.

def gitAdd(fileName, repoDir):
    cmd = ['git', 'add', fileName]
    p = subprocess.Popen(cmd, cwd=repoDir)
    p.wait()

gitAdd('exampleFile.txt', '/usr/local/example_git_repo_dir')

This isn't fully incorporated into my program yet, but I'm not anticipating a problem, except maybe speed (since I'll be processing hundreds or even thousands of files at times).

Maybe I just didn't have the patience to get things going with Dulwich or GitPython. That said, I'm hopeful the modules will get more development and be more useful soon.

I'd recommend pygit2 - it uses the excellent libgit2 bindings

This is a pretty old question, and while looking for Git libraries, I found one that was made this year (2013) called Gittle.

It worked great for me (where the others I tried were flaky), and seems to cover most of the common actions.

Some examples from the README:

from gittle import Gittle

# Clone a repository
repo_path = '/tmp/gittle_bare'
repo_url = 'git://github.com/FriendCode/gittle.git'
repo = Gittle.clone(repo_url, repo_path)

# Stage multiple files
repo.stage(['other1.txt', 'other2.txt'])

# Do the commit
repo.commit(name="Samy Pesse", email="[email protected]", message="This is a commit")

# Authentication with RSA private key
key_file = open('/Users/Me/keys/rsa/private_rsa')
repo.auth(pkey=key_file)

# Do push
repo.push()

Maybe it helps, but Bazaar and Mercurial are both using dulwich for their Git interoperability.

Dulwich is probably different than the other in the sense that's it's a reimplementation of git in python. The other might just be a wrapper around Git's commands (so it could be simpler to use from a high level point of view: commit/add/delete), it probably means their API is very close to git's command line so you'll need to gain experience with Git.

For the sake of completeness, http://github.com/alex/pyvcs/ is an abstraction layer for all dvcs's. It uses dulwich, but provides interop with the other dvcs's.