Which language has the best Git API Bindings?

Question

Hello, I am looking at building an application with heavy ties to git..

Are there language bindings available and if so which are the most comprehensive?

Would it mean going to Bare Metal C?

Or does perl python php C# have a set of full bindings?

Thanks

Daniel

Answer 1

I'm not sure if it is the best, but for .net there is GitSharp

Answer 2

Depends what you want, by the looks of it your most comfortable with C/C#. Git is written in C, so if you want speed then maybe you should go with that. But if you want code clarity and ease of writing GitSharp is probably a better option.

Answer 3

You might try not using an API. git is structured as a suite of utilities at different levels of abstraction. You should be able to build a comprehensive set of utilities which work by calling out to these utilities and processing their output. Many of the high-level git commands are shell scripts or perl scripts which do just this, so you have plenty of examples in the git source itself to use as examples.

Good examples to start with:

• magit : git interface for emacs written in emacs lisp

• git gui : tcl, comes with git

• gitk : tcl, also comes with git

• gitview : python, comes with git in the contrib directory.

• tig : C, text-mode history browswer for git.

Answer 4

There are three different approaches with respect to using Git from within some programming language:

• Reimplementation of Git in different language. That is what the following projects do:

  • JGit which is reimplementation of Git in Java (used among others by EGit, the Eclipse Git plugin, and Gerrit Code Review),
  • Grit is Ruby library for extracting information from a git repository in an object oriented manner, which includes a partial native Ruby implementation. Used e.g. by GitHub.
  • GitSharp which is remplemantation of Git in C# for .NET and Mono, and which is following JGit wrt. functionality,
  • Dulwich which is pure-Python read-write implementation of the Git file formats and protocols.
  • Git::PurePerl is pure Perl interface to Git repositories (it was mostly based on Grit, initially).
  • Glip is "git library in PHP" - pure PHP implementation. Used by its author for eWiki.

  
  The problem with reimplementations is that they do not always implement the full functionality, and sometimes implement it wrong. On the other hand they are native, implement good performance; they may be licensed differently than C (original) implementation of Git, which is GPLv2.

• Wrappers which call Git commands and wrap result it in some kind, suitably for target language.

  • The Git.pm module distributed with git (and used by some of its commands), Git::Wrapper and Git::Repository wrap git commands for Perl.
  • JavaGit is a Java API that provides access to git repositories via calling git commands.
  • GitPython is a Python library used to interact with Git repositories, by calling the Git executables and parsing output.
  • hs-libgit is Haskell wrapper for git.

  
  The problem with wrappers is that they can be slow (they require forking a git process), and that they require git to be installed to work.

  Note also that git itself is highly scriptable (e.g. using shell scripts), thanks to the fact that beside higher level commands meant for end user (porcelain) it also provides low level commands meant for scripting (plumbing).
  

• Finally there are bindings to libgit2, which means to be re-entrant linkable library with a solid API (was Google Summer of Code 2010 project).

  • libgit2 itself is a portable, pure C implementation.
  • Ribbit is a Ruby bindings to the libgit2 linkable C Git library.
  • Geef is a simple Erlang NIF that exposes some of the libgit2 library functions to Erlang.

  
  Libgit2 is quite new project; it is work in progress, so not everything is implemented at the time of being. See libgit2 homepage for details.
  

All this information can be found at InterfacesFrontendsAndTools page on Git Wiki