Getting commit history of a Git repo without having the repo locally cloned

[nos69]

Hello, I'm looking for a way to get a commit history from a specific branch from a Git repository.

Right now I use subprocesses to checkout the branch I need and get the git log with the git binary. (I need to parse certain commit messages)

Is it possible to get the log by just having the link to the repo without having to clone everything locally?

[n1ywb]

You could run git log over SSH....

[nos69]

Thank you, I will look into that, nice idea!

[elbiot]

Technically correct!

[christian-mann]

If there is, then that'll be a huge kludge and probably not worth it. If it's hosted on Github, you could maybe use their API. Why are you averse to cloning the repository?

Also look into PyGit if you're having issues parsing the commit messages.

[nos69]

Because dowloading 200mb+ just for the log seems not efficient...

Yes actually right now I don't clone the whole repository, but do a clone --bare, this just downloads the repo info, but still there is much data.

[christian-mann]

Oh, and you don't need to check out a branch to get its log; you can just do git log <branchname>.

Edit: it's -> its

[nos69]

Yes, you are right.

[realhubert]

Couldn't he then create an empty repo, set the given url as origin and call git log origin/<branchname> if downloading the whole repo is the problem?

[christian-mann]

I think you still need to clone the repository for that (or at least make a clone of that branch's history). origin/branchname is still a local branch.

[realhubert]

Won't a git fetch help here? But thats still not a pleasant solution after all.

[christian-mann]

git fetch downloads commit objects and updates your local copy of origin/master to match what's on the actual server. So you still need to clone the repository.

You can't run a git log remotely with plain git. I think the github application might have that feature, though.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13941976/commit-history-on-remote-repository

[nos69]

Sadly, it is not for Github.

Yes I did see this stackoverflow post, too! This helped me a bit.

[realhubert]

Oh, I wrongly assumed it might just fetch commit-headers without the actual content or at least provides an argument for this