Python Git Module experiences?

Question

What are people's experiences with any of the Git modules for Python? (I know of GitPython, PyGit, and Dulwich - feel free to mention others if you know of them.) I am writing a program which will have to interact (add, delete, commit) with a Git repository, but have no experience with Git, so one of the things I'm looking for is ease of use/understanding wrt Git. The other things I'm primarily interested in are maturity and completeness of the library, a reasonable lack of bugs, continued development, and helpfulness of the documentation and developers. If you think of something else I might want/need to know, please feel free to mention it.

Answer 1

Maybe it helps, but Bazaar and Mercurial are both using dulwich for they're Git interoperability.

Dulwich is probably different than the other in the sense that's it's a reimplementation of git in python. The other might just be a wrapper around Git's commands (so it could be simpler to use from a high level point of view: commit/add/delete), it probably means their API is very close to git's command line so you'll need to gain experience with Git.

Answer 2

The git interaction library part of StGit is actually pretty good. However, it isn't broken out as a separate package but if there is sufficient interest, I'm sure that can be fixed.

It has very nice abstractions for representing commits, trees etc, and for creating new commits and trees.

Answer 3

I thought I would answer my own question, since I'm taking a different path than suggested in the answers. Nonetheless, thanks to those who answered.

First, a brief synopsis of my experiences with GitPython, PyGit, and Dulwich:

• GitPython: After downloading, I got this imported and the appropriate object initialized. However, trying to do what was suggested in the tutorial led to errors. Lacking more documentation, I turned elsewhere.
• PyGit: This would not even import, and I could find no documentation.
• Dulwich: Seems to be the most promising (at least for what I wanted and saw). I made some progress with it, more than with GitPython, since its egg comes with Python source. However, after a while, I decided it may just be easier to try what I did.

Also, StGit looks interesting, but I would need the functionality extracted into a separate module and do not want wait for that to happen right now.

In (much) less time than I spent trying to get the three modules above working, I managed to get git commands working via the subprocess module, e.g.

def gitAdd(fileName, repoDir):
    cmd = 'git add ' + fileName
    pipe = subprocess.Popen(cmd, shell=True, cwd=repoDir)
    pipe.wait()
    return

gitAdd('exampleFile.txt', '/usr/local/example_git_repo_dir')

This isn't fully incorporated into my program yet, but I'm not anticipating a problem, except maybe speed (since I'll be processing hundreds or even thousands of files at times).

Maybe I just didn't have the patience to get things going with Dulwich or GitPython. That said, I'm hopeful the modules will get more development and be more useful soon.

Answer 4

For the record, none of the aforementioned Git Python libraries seem to contain a "git status" equivalent, which is really the only thing I would want since dealing with the rest of the git commands via subprocess is so easy.

Answer 5

For the sake of completeness, http://github.com/alex/pyvcs/ is an abstraction layer for all dvcs's. It uses dulwich, but provides interop with the other dvcs's.