6 git-fast-export - Git data exporter
12 'git fast-export [<options>]' | 'git fast-import'
16 This program dumps the given revisions in a form suitable to be piped
17 into 'git fast-import'.
19 You can use it as a human-readable bundle replacement (see
20 linkgit:git-bundle[1]), or as a kind of an interactive
27 Insert 'progress' statements every <n> objects, to be shown by
28 'git fast-import' during import.
30 --signed-tags=(verbatim|warn|warn-strip|strip|abort)::
31 Specify how to handle signed tags. Since any transformation
32 after the export can change the tag names (which can also happen
33 when excluding revisions) the signatures will not match.
35 When asking to 'abort' (which is the default), this program will die
36 when encountering a signed tag. With 'strip', the tags will silently
37 be made unsigned, with 'warn-strip' they will be made unsigned but a
38 warning will be displayed, with 'verbatim', they will be silently
39 exported and with 'warn', they will be exported, but you will see a
42 --tag-of-filtered-object=(abort|drop|rewrite)::
43 Specify how to handle tags whose tagged object is filtered out.
44 Since revisions and files to export can be limited by path,
45 tagged objects may be filtered completely.
47 When asking to 'abort' (which is the default), this program will die
48 when encountering such a tag. With 'drop' it will omit such tags from
49 the output. With 'rewrite', if the tagged object is a commit, it will
50 rewrite the tag to tag an ancestor commit (via parent rewriting; see
51 linkgit:git-rev-list[1])
55 Perform move and/or copy detection, as described in the
56 linkgit:git-diff[1] manual page, and use it to generate
57 rename and copy commands in the output dump.
59 Note that earlier versions of this command did not complain and
60 produced incorrect results if you gave these options.
62 --export-marks=<file>::
63 Dumps the internal marks table to <file> when complete.
64 Marks are written one per line as `:markid SHA-1`. Only marks
65 for revisions are dumped; marks for blobs are ignored.
66 Backends can use this file to validate imports after they
67 have been completed, or to save the marks table across
68 incremental runs. As <file> is only opened and truncated
69 at completion, the same path can also be safely given to
71 The file will not be written if no new object has been
74 --import-marks=<file>::
75 Before processing any input, load the marks specified in
76 <file>. The input file must exist, must be readable, and
77 must use the same format as produced by --export-marks.
79 Any commits that have already been marked will not be exported again.
80 If the backend uses a similar --import-marks file, this allows for
81 incremental bidirectional exporting of the repository by keeping the
82 marks the same across runs.
84 --fake-missing-tagger::
85 Some old repositories have tags without a tagger. The
86 fast-import protocol was pretty strict about that, and did not
87 allow that. So fake a tagger to be able to fast-import the
91 Start the stream with a 'feature done' stanza, and terminate
92 it with a 'done' command.
95 Skip output of blob objects and instead refer to blobs via
96 their original SHA-1 hash. This is useful when rewriting the
97 directory structure or history of a repository without
98 touching the contents of individual files. Note that the
99 resulting stream can only be used by a repository which
100 already contains the necessary objects.
103 This option will cause fast-export to issue a "deleteall"
104 directive for each commit followed by a full list of all files
105 in the commit (as opposed to just listing the files which are
106 different from the commit's first parent).
109 Anonymize the contents of the repository while still retaining
110 the shape of the history and stored tree. See the section on
113 --reference-excluded-parents::
114 By default, running a command such as `git fast-export
115 master~5..master` will not include the commit master{tilde}5
116 and will make master{tilde}4 no longer have master{tilde}5 as
117 a parent (though both the old master{tilde}4 and new
118 master{tilde}4 will have all the same files). Use
119 --reference-excluded-parents to instead have the stream
120 refer to commits in the excluded range of history by their
121 sha1sum. Note that the resulting stream can only be used by a
122 repository which already contains the necessary parent
125 --show-original-ids::
126 Add an extra directive to the output for commits and blobs,
127 `original-oid <SHA1SUM>`. While such directives will likely be
128 ignored by importers such as git-fast-import, it may be useful
129 for intermediary filters (e.g. for rewriting commit messages
130 which refer to older commits, or for stripping blobs by id).
132 --reencode=(yes|no|abort)::
133 Specify how to handle `encoding` header in commit objects. When
134 asking to 'abort' (which is the default), this program will die
135 when encountering such a commit object. With 'yes', the commit
136 message will be reencoded into UTF-8. With 'no', the original
137 encoding will be preserved.
140 Apply the specified refspec to each ref exported. Multiple of them can
143 [<git-rev-list-args>...]::
144 A list of arguments, acceptable to 'git rev-parse' and
145 'git rev-list', that specifies the specific objects and references
146 to export. For example, `master~10..master` causes the
147 current master reference to be exported along with all objects
148 added since its 10th ancestor commit and (unless the
149 --reference-excluded-parents option is specified) all files
150 common to master{tilde}9 and master{tilde}10.
155 -------------------------------------------------------------------
156 $ git fast-export --all | (cd /empty/repository && git fast-import)
157 -------------------------------------------------------------------
159 This will export the whole repository and import it into the existing
160 empty repository. Except for reencoding commits that are not in
161 UTF-8, it would be a one-to-one mirror.
163 -----------------------------------------------------
164 $ git fast-export master~5..master |
165 sed "s|refs/heads/master|refs/heads/other|" |
167 -----------------------------------------------------
169 This makes a new branch called 'other' from 'master~5..master'
170 (i.e. if 'master' has linear history, it will take the last 5 commits).
172 Note that this assumes that none of the blobs and commit messages
173 referenced by that revision range contains the string
180 If the `--anonymize` option is given, git will attempt to remove all
181 identifying information from the repository while still retaining enough
182 of the original tree and history patterns to reproduce some bugs. The
183 goal is that a git bug which is found on a private repository will
184 persist in the anonymized repository, and the latter can be shared with
185 git developers to help solve the bug.
187 With this option, git will replace all refnames, paths, blob contents,
188 commit and tag messages, names, and email addresses in the output with
189 anonymized data. Two instances of the same string will be replaced
190 equivalently (e.g., two commits with the same author will have the same
191 anonymized author in the output, but bear no resemblance to the original
192 author string). The relationship between commits, branches, and tags is
193 retained, as well as the commit timestamps (but the commit messages and
194 refnames bear no resemblance to the originals). The relative makeup of
195 the tree is retained (e.g., if you have a root tree with 10 files and 3
196 trees, so will the output), but their names and the contents of the
197 files will be replaced.
199 If you think you have found a git bug, you can start by exporting an
200 anonymized stream of the whole repository:
202 ---------------------------------------------------
203 $ git fast-export --anonymize --all >anon-stream
204 ---------------------------------------------------
206 Then confirm that the bug persists in a repository created from that
207 stream (many bugs will not, as they really do depend on the exact
208 repository contents):
210 ---------------------------------------------------
213 $ git fast-import <../anon-stream
214 $ ... test your bug ...
215 ---------------------------------------------------
217 If the anonymized repository shows the bug, it may be worth sharing
218 `anon-stream` along with a regular bug report. Note that the anonymized
219 stream compresses very well, so gzipping it is encouraged. If you want
220 to examine the stream to see that it does not contain any private data,
221 you can peruse it directly before sending. You may also want to try:
223 ---------------------------------------------------
224 $ perl -pe 's/\d+/X/g' <anon-stream | sort -u | less
225 ---------------------------------------------------
227 which shows all of the unique lines (with numbers converted to "X", to
228 collapse "User 0", "User 1", etc into "User X"). This produces a much
229 smaller output, and it is usually easy to quickly confirm that there is
230 no private data in the stream.
236 Since 'git fast-import' cannot tag trees, you will not be
237 able to export the linux.git repository completely, as it contains
238 a tag referencing a tree instead of a commit.
242 linkgit:git-fast-import[1]
246 Part of the linkgit:git[1] suite