TIL Use fossil to automatically push to git

The Fossil docs have a guide on mirroring a Fossil repository with GitHub. First things first: fossil offers SQLite-based distributed version control and a bunch of other cool features. I followed the guide to get the git export functionality working. I build on the guide by:

mirroring with GitLab
- You can use Gitea, Codeberg, sr.ht, whatever!
using SSH rather than HTTPS
taking a quick tour around some cool fossil features

TL;DR

In this guide we build towards getting this command to work:

fossil git export ../gitdir   --autopush     git@gitlab.com:brie/fossilization.git

As you may have guessed, this will export the fossil repository for use with git, push it automatically to a GitLab rep via SSH.

In order to follow along:

mkdir -p ~/gitfossils/fossildir/ ~/gitfossils/gitdir

Fossil Setup

By convention, the .fossil extension is used:

cd ~/gitfossils/fossildir
fossil init cats.fossil

You'll see output like:

project-id: 1dd82519a5ee932135667692bf5806442a90ff1c
server-id:  c2218150ae99d03aa7cbb607591c184cdeb71f6d
admin-user: brie (initial password is "WHATEVER")

fossil open cats.fossil

If all goes well, you'll get some metadata about your project/repo.

Copy some files into ~/gitfossils/fossildir (Markdown, cat pictures, whatever).

This is the earliest that you can copy files into ~/gitfossils/fossildir. Any earlier and you'll get error messages. See the Appendix B.

Let's add the file:

# fossil add plop.png
ADDED  plop.png

🎉 We successfully added the file! Let's commit it. Fossil accepts emoji in commit messages! A dinosaur emoji seems appropriate:

fossil commit -m "🦖 Initial commit -- rawr"

We are done with fossil for now.

Git Setup

We need to set up an empty git repo:

cd ~/gitfossils/gitdir
git init .

🚀 Let's go!

The prep work is all done!

cd ~/gitfossils/fossildir
fossil git export ../gitdir   --autopush     git@gitlab.com:brie/fossilization.git

If all goes well, you will see familiar out put at this point:

Enumerating objects: 5, done.
Counting objects: 100% (5/5), done.
Delta compression using up to 16 threads
Compressing objects: 100% (3/3), done.
Writing objects: 100% (5/5), 168.76 KiB | 4.96 MiB/s, done.
Total 5 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0

Check it out!

Browse to the GitLab repository via the Web interface.

What's next?

file cats.fossil
cats.fossil: SQLite 3.x database (Fossil repository), last written using SQLite version 3041000, file counter 26, database pages 939, cookie 0x2a, schema 4, UTF-8, version-valid-for 26

Exploring the `git` repo

In git log, we see:

FossilOrigin-Name: b6301d69d9069cbdc54a1a5fa47fa46d193ad86e510cc82eec14099ab3f620aa

Make some changes

Back to fossil, so cd ~/gitfossils/fossildir and let's use fossil status. At the end, we see that the file has been edited:

EDITED     plop.png

fossil diff
Index: plop.png
==================================================================
--- plop.png
+++ plop.png
cannot compute difference between binary files

Explore the project

CLI

fossil timeline
=== 2023-03-11 ===
17:14:24 [b6301d69d9] *CURRENT* 🧪 Let us make some changes (user: brie tags: trunk)
16:40:02 [c34e145eb0] 🦖 Initial commit -- rawr (user: brie tags: trunk)
16:35:51 [b868ce4705] initial empty check-in (user: brie tags: trunk)
+++ no more data (3) +++

Web UI

Let's check out the Web interface:

fossil ui

At /home, we get a hint on how to name the project. That accepts emoji.

Export and autopush the changes

Let's export the changes:

fossil git export

It just works!

🔖 READmore

Appendix A: Branch Names

The fossil docs note:

The name of the "trunk" branch is automatically translated into "master" in the Git mirror unless you give the --mainbranch option, added in Fossil 2.14.

This did not quite work for me:

It seems I have the right version:

fossil version
This is fossil version 2.21 [f9aa474081] 2023-02-25 19:23:39 UTC

I tested putting --mainbranch in different places in the command because sometimes that matters:

➜  fossildir fossil git export ../gitdir --mainbranch  --autopush    git@gitlab.com:brie/fossilization.git
unrecognized command-line option or missing argument: --mainbranch
➜  fossildir fossil git export ../gitdir   --autopush   --mainbranch  git@gitlab.com:brie/fossilization.git
Usage: fossil git export ?MIRROR?
➜  fossildir fossil git export ../gitdir   --autopush     git@gitlab.com:brie/fossilization.git
git fast-import --export-marks=.mirror_state/marks.txt --quiet --done
2 check-ins added to the /Users/brie/gitfossils/gitdir
git update-ref "refs/heads/master" 66331175848bbc7c52241a40a7a855c613758ecf
git push --mirror git@gitlab.com:brie/fossilization.git

TODO I will update this post if I explore this and find something useful.

Appendix B: Impatience

~/bin/fossil open cats.fossil
directory /Users/brie/gitfossils/fossildir is not empty
use the -f (--force) option to override
or the -k (--keep) option to keep local files unchanged

ℹ️ About this TIL snippet: Created 2023-03-11T12:49:50-05:00 · View the source