git-fast-export(1)

NAME

   git-fast-export - Git data exporter

SYNOPSIS

   git fast-export [options] | git fast-import

DESCRIPTION

   This program dumps the given revisions in a form suitable to be piped
   into git fast-import.

   You can use it as a human-readable bundle replacement (see git-
   bundle(1)), or as a kind of an interactive git filter-branch.

OPTIONS

   --progress=<n>
       Insert progress statements every <n> objects, to be shown by git
       fast-import during import.

   --signed-tags=(verbatim|warn|warn-strip|strip|abort)
       Specify how to handle signed tags. Since any transformation after
       the export can change the tag names (which can also happen when
       excluding revisions) the signatures will not match.

       When asking to abort (which is the default), this program will die
       when encountering a signed tag. With strip, the tags will silently
       be made unsigned, with warn-strip they will be made unsigned but a
       warning will be displayed, with verbatim, they will be silently
       exported and with warn, they will be exported, but you will see a
       warning.

   --tag-of-filtered-object=(abort|drop|rewrite)
       Specify how to handle tags whose tagged object is filtered out.
       Since revisions and files to export can be limited by path, tagged
       objects may be filtered completely.

       When asking to abort (which is the default), this program will die
       when encountering such a tag. With drop it will omit such tags from
       the output. With rewrite, if the tagged object is a commit, it will
       rewrite the tag to tag an ancestor commit (via parent rewriting;
       see git-rev-list(1))

   -M, -C
       Perform move and/or copy detection, as described in the git-diff(1)
       manual page, and use it to generate rename and copy commands in the
       output dump.

       Note that earlier versions of this command did not complain and
       produced incorrect results if you gave these options.

   --export-marks=<file>
       Dumps the internal marks table to <file> when complete. Marks are
       written one per line as :markid SHA-1. Only marks for revisions are
       dumped; marks for blobs are ignored. Backends can use this file to
       validate imports after they have been completed, or to save the
       marks table across incremental runs. As <file> is only opened and
       truncated at completion, the same path can also be safely given to
       --import-marks. The file will not be written if no new object has
       been marked/exported.

   --import-marks=<file>
       Before processing any input, load the marks specified in <file>.
       The input file must exist, must be readable, and must use the same
       format as produced by --export-marks.

       Any commits that have already been marked will not be exported
       again. If the backend uses a similar --import-marks file, this
       allows for incremental bidirectional exporting of the repository by
       keeping the marks the same across runs.

   --fake-missing-tagger
       Some old repositories have tags without a tagger. The fast-import
       protocol was pretty strict about that, and did not allow that. So
       fake a tagger to be able to fast-import the output.

   --use-done-feature
       Start the stream with a feature done stanza, and terminate it with
       a done command.

   --no-data
       Skip output of blob objects and instead refer to blobs via their
       original SHA-1 hash. This is useful when rewriting the directory
       structure or history of a repository without touching the contents
       of individual files. Note that the resulting stream can only be
       used by a repository which already contains the necessary objects.

   --full-tree
       This option will cause fast-export to issue a "deleteall" directive
       for each commit followed by a full list of all files in the commit
       (as opposed to just listing the files which are different from the
       commit's first parent).

   --anonymize
       Anonymize the contents of the repository while still retaining the
       shape of the history and stored tree. See the section on
       ANONYMIZING below.

   --refspec
       Apply the specified refspec to each ref exported. Multiple of them
       can be specified.

   [<git-rev-list-args>...]
       A list of arguments, acceptable to git rev-parse and git rev-list,
       that specifies the specific objects and references to export. For
       example, master~10..master causes the current master reference to
       be exported along with all objects added since its 10th ancestor
       commit.

EXAMPLES

       $ git fast-export --all | (cd /empty/repository && git fast-import)

   This will export the whole repository and import it into the existing
   empty repository. Except for reencoding commits that are not in UTF-8,
   it would be a one-to-one mirror.

       $ git fast-export master~5..master |
               sed "s|refs/heads/master|refs/heads/other|" |
               git fast-import

   This makes a new branch called other from master~5..master (i.e. if
   master has linear history, it will take the last 5 commits).

   Note that this assumes that none of the blobs and commit messages
   referenced by that revision range contains the string
   refs/heads/master.

ANONYMIZING

   If the --anonymize option is given, git will attempt to remove all
   identifying information from the repository while still retaining
   enough of the original tree and history patterns to reproduce some
   bugs. The goal is that a git bug which is found on a private repository
   will persist in the anonymized repository, and the latter can be shared
   with git developers to help solve the bug.

   With this option, git will replace all refnames, paths, blob contents,
   commit and tag messages, names, and email addresses in the output with
   anonymized data. Two instances of the same string will be replaced
   equivalently (e.g., two commits with the same author will have the same
   anonymized author in the output, but bear no resemblance to the
   original author string). The relationship between commits, branches,
   and tags is retained, as well as the commit timestamps (but the commit
   messages and refnames bear no resemblance to the originals). The
   relative makeup of the tree is retained (e.g., if you have a root tree
   with 10 files and 3 trees, so will the output), but their names and the
   contents of the files will be replaced.

   If you think you have found a git bug, you can start by exporting an
   anonymized stream of the whole repository:

       $ git fast-export --anonymize --all >anon-stream

   Then confirm that the bug persists in a repository created from that
   stream (many bugs will not, as they really do depend on the exact
   repository contents):

       $ git init anon-repo
       $ cd anon-repo
       $ git fast-import <../anon-stream
       $ ... test your bug ...

   If the anonymized repository shows the bug, it may be worth sharing
   anon-stream along with a regular bug report. Note that the anonymized
   stream compresses very well, so gzipping it is encouraged. If you want
   to examine the stream to see that it does not contain any private data,
   you can peruse it directly before sending. You may also want to try:

       $ perl -pe 's/\d+/X/g' <anon-stream | sort -u | less

   which shows all of the unique lines (with numbers converted to "X", to
   collapse "User 0", "User 1", etc into "User X"). This produces a much
   smaller output, and it is usually easy to quickly confirm that there is
   no private data in the stream.

LIMITATIONS

   Since git fast-import cannot tag trees, you will not be able to export
   the linux.git repository completely, as it contains a tag referencing a
   tree instead of a commit.

SEE ALSO

   git-fast-import(1)

GIT

   Part of the git(1) suite

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Free and Open Source Software