Seven general-purpose Git utilities
git-crypt
This tool provides encryption to be used with a Git repository. It can be used to decide which files should be encrypted and which users can encrypt or decrypt. To set up an encrypted Git repository, use gpg --gen-key
to create a key for each user.
Next, to make files visible locally, but not on a pull request (i.e., remotely), run git-crypt init
to initialize the repository for use. Then select the files that will be affected by creating a .gitattributes
file to place in the repo. For each file to encrypt, use the format:
FILE filter=git-crypt diff=git-crypt
Wildcards can be used to reduce the number of entries. According to some users, you can ensure that .fileattributes
is not encrypted by adding the line:
.gitattributes filter !diff`
However, my system reads the line as an error.
The only ways remote users can read the encrypted files is if their encryption key is added using the command
git-crypt add-gpg-user GPG_USER_ID
or if the repository key is exported with:
$ git-crypt export-key KEY-PATH
After which, the remote user can access the files with:
git-crypt unlock KEY PATH
You can also temporarily make the files accessible to everyone by using git-crypt unlock
. To re-encrypt, use the lock
option.
git-repair
The core of Git includes a fsck
command. However, while fsck
finds problems in a repository, it does not fix them. By contrast, git-repair
runs fsck
and makes what repairs it can. First, git-repair
deletes corrupt objects and retrieves remote versions of missing objects. After that, if the repository is still corrupt, using the --force
option, git-repair
can revert branches to an uncorrupt state, delete lost branches, and remove missing files from the index. Note that git-repair
's purpose is to create a functional repository, not to recover everything. Consequently, you may need to recover some files from cloned repositories or backups. After running git-repair
, you should run git fsck
and git gc
to finish the restoration (Figure 4).
git-sizer
Git repositories are intended for source text. For that reason, they work best when smaller than one gigabyte and can become unwieldy at about five gigabytes. Although it might be convenient to store all Git-related material in the same directory, it is more efficient to have another directory for media files, logs, and files generated by other commands. Periodically, too, you might check for unnecessary branches. This housekeeping is simplified by git-sizer
, a simple command without any options, that reports on the contents of a repository and flags any potential problems. As a side effect, git-sizer
also provides an overall view of a repository's contents (Figure 5).
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