grgit

[!NOTE] As of 5.0.0, grgit is only published to Maven Central

Project Status

My opinion is that grgit no longer serves a useful purpose in the Gradle ecosystem, given the evolution towards Kotlin DSL and the stronger preference to move build logic into plugins.

However, I understand the backwards compatibility need, so I'm not immediately stopping maintenance. I do consider the plugin feature frozen, and don't anticipate doing any work outside of updating dependencies and limited work to maintain compatibility with new versions of Gradle.

For my own sake, I've already decoupled reckon (which I don't plan to deprecate/archive) from grgit. I anticipate doing the same with gradle-git-publish, but I haven't had the time yet.

For more background on this see my Don't commit to grgit blog post.

Getting Help

[!IMPORTANT] I consider this plugin feature frozen. Requests for new features will be closed.

If updating grgit versions or Gradle versions causes a bug in existing grgit behavior in your build, feel free to open an issue.

Why do you care?

JGit provides a powerful Java API for interacting with Git repositories. However, in a Groovy context it feels very cumbersome, making it harder to express the operations you want to perform without being surrounded by a lot of cruft.

[!CAUTION] See the "Project Status" section above and consider if you really need grgit's functionality. I strongly advise against using it in new Groovy projects or Gradle builds.

What is it?

Grgit is a wrapper over JGit that provides a fluent API for interacting with Git repositories in Groovy-based tooling.

"porcelain" commands are the primary scope of what is included. Features that require more user interaction (such as resolving merge conflicts) are intentionally excluded.

It also provides a Gradle plugin to easily get a Grgit instance for the build's repository.

Documentation

[!NOTE] grgit is only available from Maven Central

• Documentation Site
• Release Notes

[!IMPORTANT] grgit is not compatible with Gradle's configuration cache and is out of scope for future work on grgit.

Simple Usage in Gradle

[!NOTE] org.ajoberstar.grgit has poor compatibility with Kotlin scripts. See #361 for an example.

Apply the org.ajoberstar.grgit plugin in any project that needs to access a Grgit instance.

[!NOTE] This plugin eagerly opens a Grgit instance, which may not be needed depending on the tasks you want to run. If this is not desired, see the next section.

plugins {
  id 'org.ajoberstar.grgit' version '<version>'
}

// adds a grgit property to the project (will silently be null if there's no git repo)
tasks.register("describe") {
  doFirst {
    println grgit.describe()
  }
}

More Performant Usage in Gradle

Apply the org.ajoberstar.grgit.service plugin instead of org.ajoberstar.grgit to avoid eagerly resolving the Grgit instance. This works best with custom tasks that accept a Property<GrgitService>.

This approach ensures you only open a Grgit instance when a task is run that uses it.

import org.ajoberstar.grgit.gradle.GrgitService

plugins {
  id 'org.ajoberstar.grgit.service' version '<version>'
}

tasks.register("describe", DescribeTask, grgitService.service)

class DescribeTask extends DefaultTask {
    private final Provider<GrgitService> service

    @Inject
    DescribeTask(Provider<GrgitService> service) {
        this.service = service
        usesService(service)
    }

    @TaskAction
    void execute() {
        println service.get().grgit.describe()
    }
}

Custom Gradle Plugins

If you are writing a custom Gradle plugin, you'll want to use one or both of the following approaches:

• If you need a Grgit instance representing the repository the project is in, use org.ajoberstar.grgit.service and use the GrgitServiceExtension to access the shared GrgitService. Wire this into any tasks or whatever needs to use the service via Property<GrgitService> for full lazy evaluation benefits.

• If you need a Grgit instance that's separate from the project's repository, declare your own GrgitService naming it something not prefixed with grgit*.

  Provider<GrgitService> serviceProvider = project.getGradle().getSharedServices().registerIfAbsent("grgit", GrgitService.class, spec -> {
      // use getCurrentDirectory() if you need to search upwards from the provided directory
      spec.getParameters().getCurrentDirectory().set(project.getLayout().getProjectDirectory());
      // or use getDirectory() if you want to specify a specific directory and not search
      spec.getParameters().getDirectory().set(project.getLayout().getBuildDirectory().dir("my-custom-repo"));
      // generally, this should be false, unless you're using getDirectory() choose to have the repo initialized if the directory does not exist
      spec.getParameters().getInitIfNotExists().set(false);
      // I recommend setting this to 1 unless you know better, this will avoid multiple parallel tasks editing the repo at the same time
      // This should be coupled with tasks that use the service calling "usesService()" to register their usage of the service
      spec.getMaxParallelUsages().set(1);
    });
  

Finding versions of grgit

Newest versions are on Maven Central

As of 4.1.1, grgit is published to Maven Central and the Gradle Plugin Portal.

As of 5.0.0, this project is no longer directly published to the Gradle Plugin Portal, but since the portal proxies Maven Central you can still access it through the portal. The only side effect is that the portal will no longer list the latest version. Use this repo or search.maven.org to find the latest version.

Old versions from Bintray/JCenter

This project was previously uploaded to JCenter, which was deprecated in 2021.

In the event that JCenter is unavailable and acess to past versions (4.1.0 and earlier) is needed, I've made a Maven repo available in bintray-backup. Add the following to your repositories to use it.

maven {
  name = 'ajoberstar-backup'
  url = 'https://ajoberstar.org/bintray-backup/'
}

Made possible by lacasseio/bintray-helper in case you have a similar need to pull your old Bintray artifacts.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to the library.