1 Git Protocol Capabilities
2 =========================
4 Servers SHOULD support all capabilities defined in this document.
6 On the very first line of the initial server response of either
7 receive-pack and upload-pack the first reference is followed by
8 a NUL byte and then a list of space delimited server capabilities.
9 These allow the server to declare what it can and cannot support
12 Client will then send a space separated list of capabilities it wants
13 to be in effect. The client MUST NOT ask for capabilities the server
14 did not say it supports.
16 Server MUST diagnose and abort if capabilities it does not understand
17 was sent. Server MUST NOT ignore capabilities that client requested
18 and server advertised. As a consequence of these rules, server MUST
19 NOT advertise capabilities it does not understand.
21 The 'report-status', 'delete-refs', and 'quiet' capabilities are sent and
22 recognized by the receive-pack (push to server) process.
24 The 'ofs-delta' and 'side-band-64k' capabilities are sent and recognized
25 by both upload-pack and receive-pack protocols. The 'agent' capability
26 may optionally be sent in both protocols.
28 All other capabilities are only recognized by the upload-pack (fetch
34 The 'multi_ack' capability allows the server to return "ACK obj-id
35 continue" as soon as it finds a commit that it can use as a common
36 base, between the client's wants and the client's have set.
38 By sending this early, the server can potentially head off the client
39 from walking any further down that particular branch of the client's
40 repository history. The client may still need to walk down other
41 branches, sending have lines for those, until the server has a
42 complete cut across the DAG, or the client has said "done".
44 Without multi_ack, a client sends have lines in --date-order until
45 the server has found a common base. That means the client will send
46 have lines that are already known by the server to be common, because
47 they overlap in time with another branch that the server hasn't found
50 For example suppose the client has commits in caps that the server
51 doesn't and the server has commits in lower case that the client
52 doesn't, as in the following diagram:
54 +---- u ---------------------- x
57 a -- b -- c -- d -- E -- F
61 If the client wants x,y and starts out by saying have F,S, the server
62 doesn't know what F,S is. Eventually the client says "have d" and
63 the server sends "ACK d continue" to let the client know to stop
64 walking down that line (so don't send c-b-a), but it's not done yet,
65 it needs a base for x. The client keeps going with S-R-Q, until a
66 gets reached, at which point the server has a clear base and it all
69 Without multi_ack the client would have sent that c-b-a chain anyway,
70 interleaved with S-R-Q.
75 A thin pack is one with deltas which reference base objects not
76 contained within the pack (but are known to exist at the receiving
77 end). This can reduce the network traffic significantly, but it
78 requires the receiving end to know how to "thicken" these packs by
79 adding the missing bases to the pack.
81 The upload-pack server advertises 'thin-pack' when it can generate
82 and send a thin pack. A client requests the 'thin-pack' capability
83 when it understands how to "thicken" it, notifying the server that
84 it can receive such a pack. A client MUST NOT request the
85 'thin-pack' capability if it cannot turn a thin pack into a
88 Receive-pack, on the other hand, is assumed by default to be able to
89 handle thin packs, but can ask the client not to use the feature by
90 advertising the 'no-thin' capability. A client MUST NOT send a thin
91 pack if the server advertises the 'no-thin' capability.
93 The reasons for this asymmetry are historical. The receive-pack
94 program did not exist until after the invention of thin packs, so
95 historically the reference implementation of receive-pack always
96 understood thin packs. Adding 'no-thin' later allowed receive-pack
97 to disable the feature in a backwards-compatible manner.
100 side-band, side-band-64k
101 ------------------------
103 This capability means that server can send, and client understand multiplexed
104 progress reports and error info interleaved with the packfile itself.
106 These two options are mutually exclusive. A modern client always
107 favors 'side-band-64k'.
109 Either mode indicates that the packfile data will be streamed broken
110 up into packets of up to either 1000 bytes in the case of 'side_band',
111 or 65520 bytes in the case of 'side_band_64k'. Each packet is made up
112 of a leading 4-byte pkt-line length of how much data is in the packet,
113 followed by a 1-byte stream code, followed by the actual data.
115 The stream code can be one of:
118 2 - progress messages
119 3 - fatal error message just before stream aborts
121 The "side-band-64k" capability came about as a way for newer clients
122 that can handle much larger packets to request packets that are
123 actually crammed nearly full, while maintaining backward compatibility
124 for the older clients.
126 Further, with side-band and its up to 1000-byte messages, it's actually
127 999 bytes of payload and 1 byte for the stream code. With side-band-64k,
128 same deal, you have up to 65519 bytes of data and 1 byte for the stream
131 The client MUST send only maximum of one of "side-band" and "side-
132 band-64k". Server MUST diagnose it as an error if client requests
138 Server can send, and client understand PACKv2 with delta referring to
139 its base by position in pack rather than by an obj-id. That is, they can
140 send/read OBJ_OFS_DELTA (aka type 6) in a packfile.
145 The server may optionally send a capability of the form `agent=X` to
146 notify the client that the server is running version `X`. The client may
147 optionally return its own agent string by responding with an `agent=Y`
148 capability (but it MUST NOT do so if the server did not mention the
149 agent capability). The `X` and `Y` strings may contain any printable
150 ASCII characters except space (i.e., the byte range 32 < x < 127), and
151 are typically of the form "package/version" (e.g., "git/1.8.3.1"). The
152 agent strings are purely informative for statistics and debugging
153 purposes, and MUST NOT be used to programatically assume the presence
154 or absence of particular features.
159 This capability adds "deepen", "shallow" and "unshallow" commands to
160 the fetch-pack/upload-pack protocol so clients can request shallow
166 The client was started with "git clone -q" or something, and doesn't
167 want that side band 2. Basically the client just says "I do not
168 wish to receive stream 2 on sideband, so do not send it to me, and if
169 you did, I will drop it on the floor anyway". However, the sideband
170 channel 3 is still used for error responses.
175 The 'include-tag' capability is about sending annotated tags if we are
176 sending objects they point to. If we pack an object to the client, and
177 a tag object points exactly at that object, we pack the tag object too.
178 In general this allows a client to get all new annotated tags when it
179 fetches a branch, in a single network connection.
181 Clients MAY always send include-tag, hardcoding it into a request when
182 the server advertises this capability. The decision for a client to
183 request include-tag only has to do with the client's desires for tag
184 data, whether or not a server had advertised objects in the
185 refs/tags/* namespace.
187 Servers MUST pack the tags if their referrant is packed and the client
188 has requested include-tags.
190 Clients MUST be prepared for the case where a server has ignored
191 include-tag and has not actually sent tags in the pack. In such
192 cases the client SHOULD issue a subsequent fetch to acquire the tags
193 that include-tag would have otherwise given the client.
195 The server SHOULD send include-tag, if it supports it, regardless
196 of whether or not there are tags available.
201 The receive-pack process can receive a 'report-status' capability,
202 which tells it that the client wants a report of what happened after
203 a packfile upload and reference update. If the pushing client requests
204 this capability, after unpacking and updating references the server
205 will respond with whether the packfile unpacked successfully and if
206 each reference was updated successfully. If any of those were not
207 successful, it will send back an error message. See pack-protocol.txt
208 for example messages.
213 If the server sends back the 'delete-refs' capability, it means that
214 it is capable of accepting a zero-id value as the target
215 value of a reference update. It is not sent back by the client, it
216 simply informs the client that it can be sent zero-id values
217 to delete references.
222 If the receive-pack server advertises the 'quiet' capability, it is
223 capable of silencing human-readable progress output which otherwise may
224 be shown when processing the received pack. A send-pack client should
225 respond with the 'quiet' capability to suppress server-side progress
226 reporting if the local progress reporting is also being suppressed
227 (e.g., via `push -q`, or if stderr does not go to a tty).
229 allow-tip-sha1-in-want
230 ----------------------
232 If the upload-pack server advertises this capability, fetch-pack may
233 send "want" lines with SHA-1s that exist at the server but are not
234 advertised by upload-pack.
projects / git / blob