How to Use Gitpython Effectively for Python Projects in 2022?

GitPython can do more than just read data. Even we can directly interact with the git repository and can perform all the operations

GitPython is a Python code library for programmatically reading from and writing to Git source control repositories. It provides abstractions of git objects for easy access to repository data and additionally allows you to access the git repository more directly using pure python implementation. Python is one of the top three programming languages in the world and is poised to become the most popular, according to ZDNet. In fact, according to the PYPL Index, Python is the most popular programming language worldwide. Have you ever worked on a Python project that stopped working after you made a change here or a PEP-8 cleanup there, and you weren't quite sure how to get it back? Version control systems can help you solve that and other related problems. Git is one of the most popular version control systems today. This article features how to use Gitpython effectively for Python projects in 2022.

Version Control

A version control system (VCS) is a set of tools that track the history of a set of files. This means that you can tell your VCS (Gitpython, in this case) to save the state of your Python project at any point. Then, you may continue to edit the files and store that state as well. Saving the state is similar to creating a backup copy of your working directory. When you make a commit in Git, you add a commit message that explains at a high level what changes you made in this commit. Git can show you the history of all of the commits and their commit messages. This provides a useful history of what work you have done and can really help pinpoint when a bug crept into the system.

Requirements for GitPython

• Python3
• Git
• GitPython module
• pip and virtualenv, which come packaged with Python 3, to install and isolate the GitPython library from any other Python project.

What is Git?

Git is a distributed version control system software product. It lets you create and manage Git repositories. The software was developed by Linus Trovalds in 2005. While originally intended for Linux, the software has been ported to other major operating systems, like Windows and OSX. Git is compatible with Python, as well as some of the other major programming languages like Java, Ruby and C. C was the original language it was written in.

The purpose of Git is to manage a set of files that belong to a python project. As the python project is developed, its files change over time. Git tracks these changes and stores them in a repository, which is a typical data structure (it can handle large amounts of easy-to-retrieve data). If the user dislikes a change or a set of changes made in the project, he can use Git to rollback those changes.

Installation

You can use pip to install the gitpython package like this:

python -m pip install gitpython

You can also get the source code from https://github.com/gitpython-developers/GitPython and run the setup.py file like this:

git clone https://github.com/gitpython-developers/GitPython

cd GitPython

python setup.py install

Manage repositories

Initialize a new Repository

To start a new repository, you can use git. Repo.init() which is equivalent to running git init.

import git

# `git init new_repo`

new_repo = git.Repo.init('new_repo')

This will create a new directory named new_repo with the .git directory.

Open an Existing Local REPO

To open an existing repo on disk, pass the repo directory ot the Repo() object initializer:

import git

my_repo = git.Repo('existing_repo')

Clone a Remote Repository 

To clone a remote repository, use git.Repo.clone_from().

import git

# Check out via HTTPS

git.Repo.clone_from('https://github.com/DevDungeon/Cookbook', 'Cookbook-https')

# or clone via ssh (will use default keys)

git.Repo.clone_from('git@github.cim:DevDungeon/Cookbook', 'Cookbook-ssh')

Create a Clone of a Local REPO

You can take an existing repo, load it, and then clone that to another local repo. You might want to do this if you use the primary repository as a template for creating new projects.

import git

# Load existing local repo

my_repo = git.Repo('existing_repo')

# Create a copy of the existing repo

my_repo.clone('/path/to/clone_of_existing_repo')

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