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NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | SPECIFYING REFERENCES | EXAMPLE | GIT | COLOPHON |
GIT-BUNDLE(1) Git Manual GIT-BUNDLE(1)
git-bundle - Move objects and refs by archive
git bundle create <file> <git-rev-list-args>
git bundle verify <file>
git bundle list-heads <file> [<refname>...]
git bundle unbundle <file> [<refname>...]
Some workflows require that one or more branches of development on
one machine be replicated on another machine, but the two machines
cannot be directly connected, and therefore the interactive Git
protocols (git, ssh, http) cannot be used. This command provides
support for git fetch and git pull to operate by packaging objects
and references in an archive at the originating machine, then
importing those into another repository using git fetch and git pull
after moving the archive by some means (e.g., by sneakernet). As no
direct connection between the repositories exists, the user must
specify a basis for the bundle that is held by the destination
repository: the bundle assumes that all objects in the basis are
already in the destination repository.
create <file>
Used to create a bundle named file. This requires the
git-rev-list-args arguments to define the bundle contents.
verify <file>
Used to check that a bundle file is valid and will apply cleanly
to the current repository. This includes checks on the bundle
format itself as well as checking that the prerequisite commits
exist and are fully linked in the current repository. git bundle
prints a list of missing commits, if any, and exits with a
non-zero status.
list-heads <file>
Lists the references defined in the bundle. If followed by a list
of references, only references matching those given are printed
out.
unbundle <file>
Passes the objects in the bundle to git index-pack for storage in
the repository, then prints the names of all defined references.
If a list of references is given, only references matching those
in the list are printed. This command is really plumbing,
intended to be called only by git fetch.
<git-rev-list-args>
A list of arguments, acceptable to git rev-parse and git rev-list
(and containing a named ref, see SPECIFYING REFERENCES below),
that specifies the specific objects and references to transport.
For example, master~10..master causes the current master
reference to be packaged along with all objects added since its
10th ancestor commit. There is no explicit limit to the number of
references and objects that may be packaged.
[<refname>...]
A list of references used to limit the references reported as
available. This is principally of use to git fetch, which expects
to receive only those references asked for and not necessarily
everything in the pack (in this case, git bundle acts like git
fetch-pack).
git bundle will only package references that are shown by git
show-ref: this includes heads, tags, and remote heads. References
such as master~1 cannot be packaged, but are perfectly suitable for
defining the basis. More than one reference may be packaged, and more
than one basis can be specified. The objects packaged are those not
contained in the union of the given bases. Each basis can be
specified explicitly (e.g. ^master~10), or implicitly (e.g.
master~10..master, --since=10.days.ago master).
It is very important that the basis used be held by the destination.
It is okay to err on the side of caution, causing the bundle file to
contain objects already in the destination, as these are ignored when
unpacking at the destination.
Assume you want to transfer the history from a repository R1 on
machine A to another repository R2 on machine B. For whatever reason,
direct connection between A and B is not allowed, but we can move
data from A to B via some mechanism (CD, email, etc.). We want to
update R2 with development made on the branch master in R1.
To bootstrap the process, you can first create a bundle that does not
have any basis. You can use a tag to remember up to what commit you
last processed, in order to make it easy to later update the other
repository with an incremental bundle:
machineA$ cd R1
machineA$ git bundle create file.bundle master
machineA$ git tag -f lastR2bundle master
Then you transfer file.bundle to the target machine B. Because this
bundle does not require any existing object to be extracted, you can
create a new repository on machine B by cloning from it:
machineB$ git clone -b master /home/me/tmp/file.bundle R2
This will define a remote called "origin" in the resulting repository
that lets you fetch and pull from the bundle. The $GIT_DIR/config
file in R2 will have an entry like this:
[remote "origin"]
url = /home/me/tmp/file.bundle
fetch = refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
To update the resulting mine.git repository, you can fetch or pull
after replacing the bundle stored at /home/me/tmp/file.bundle with
incremental updates.
After working some more in the original repository, you can create an
incremental bundle to update the other repository:
machineA$ cd R1
machineA$ git bundle create file.bundle lastR2bundle..master
machineA$ git tag -f lastR2bundle master
You then transfer the bundle to the other machine to replace
/home/me/tmp/file.bundle, and pull from it.
machineB$ cd R2
machineB$ git pull
If you know up to what commit the intended recipient repository
should have the necessary objects, you can use that knowledge to
specify the basis, giving a cut-off point to limit the revisions and
objects that go in the resulting bundle. The previous example used
the lastR2bundle tag for this purpose, but you can use any other
options that you would give to the git-log(1) command. Here are more
examples:
You can use a tag that is present in both:
$ git bundle create mybundle v1.0.0..master
You can use a basis based on time:
$ git bundle create mybundle --since=10.days master
You can use the number of commits:
$ git bundle create mybundle -10 master
You can run git-bundle verify to see if you can extract from a bundle
that was created with a basis:
$ git bundle verify mybundle
This will list what commits you must have in order to extract from
the bundle and will error out if you do not have them.
A bundle from a recipient repository’s point of view is just like a
regular repository which it fetches or pulls from. You can, for
example, map references when fetching:
$ git fetch mybundle master:localRef
You can also see what references it offers:
$ git ls-remote mybundle
Part of the git(1) suite
This page is part of the git (Git distributed version control system)
project. Information about the project can be found at
⟨http://git-scm.com/⟩. If you have a bug report for this manual page,
see ⟨http://git-scm.com/community⟩. This page was obtained from the
project's upstream Git repository ⟨https://github.com/git/git.git⟩ on
2017-07-05. If you discover any rendering problems in this HTML ver‐
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information in this COLOPHON (which is not part of the original man‐
ual page), send a mail to man-pages@man7.org
Git 2.8.0.rc1 03/10/2016 GIT-BUNDLE(1)
Pages that refer to this page: dpkg-source(1), git(1), git-fast-export(1), git-pack-objects(1)