Git: Editing a file in a bare repo using Git plumbing commands

Question

I'm trying to create a basic GIT web UI for GIT bare repos which allows edit (only) of existing files.

For example, considering these two cases:

/dir-a/dir-b/dir-c/a-file.txt
/a-file.txt

How could I use the Git low level plumbing commands to save the edits? Also, I'm using Grit, not sure if it provides a shortcut to do this.

Michał Politowski · Answer 1 · 2012-10-19T15:19:09.120

2

I do not know about Grit, but with Git itself you could do it like this, using the index.

Let's assume that the new content to be stored in dir-a/dir-b/dir-c/a-file.txt is available in /tmp/new-content.txt.

git read-tree HEAD
newhash=$(git hash-object -w --path=dir-a/dir-b/dir-c/a-file.txt /tmp/new-content.txt)
git update-index --cacheinfo 0644 $newhash dir-a/dir-b/dir-c/a-file.txt
newtree=$(git write-tree)
newcommit=$(git commit-tree $newtree -p HEAD -m 'file editedin a bare repository')
git update-ref HEAD $newcommit

edited Oct 19 '12 at 15:19

answered Oct 19 '12 at 09:55

Michał Politowski

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So if a file in a deeply nested directory changes, I have to regenerate the hashes for all the parent dirs, right ? – Akshay Rawat Oct 19 '12 at 12:27
@AkshayRawat - no. I updated the example. I suppose you could handle the trees by hand as well, with `git mktree` etc., but here we use the index. – Michał Politowski Oct 19 '12 at 15:22
Thanks a lot! I was wanting to do this for bare repos where there are no indexes. – Akshay Rawat Oct 19 '12 at 15:54
Not by default, but read-tree still works. Why don't you try it? – Michał Politowski Oct 19 '12 at 16:03

Git: Editing a file in a bare repo using Git plumbing commands

1 Answers1