git-selective-archive

A tool written in Python3 to export a subset of a Git repository to one or more partner.

This is mostly useful for owners of enterprise / closed source repositories who want to share a subset of the repository with one or more partners.

The subsets are archives created by git-archive. Normally, git-archive collect all files of a given ref. However, this can be controlled by the attribute export-ignore. git-selective-archive creates these attributes from a list of git-ignore compliant patterns. Only files which match the combined patterns will be included in the archive.

Example

The following configuration describes 2 partners. The first one will receive all Java files with the exception of foo.java, and the second one will receive everything under /src with the exception of files under src/internal.

[partner1]
*.java
!foo.java
[partner2]
src/
!src/internal

git selective-archive --tag release1 will create 2 files: partner1_release1.tar.xz and partner2_release1.tar.xz with the matching files from the tag release1.

The default name for the configuration file is .gitselectivearchive in the current directory. In most cases this should be the toplevel or the work tree (i.e. next to .git/).

Invocation

git-selective-archive understands the following parameters:

• --tag, -t: the tag identifying the tree which forms the base of the archive
• --format, -f: passed on to git-archive to specify the archive format
• --config, -c: the name of the configuration file
• --repo, -r: the directory of the work tree
• --dry-run, -n: shows what would be included in every archive but does not create the archives
• --verbose, -v: prints debugging information
• --help, -h: prints a help message