Git was originally designed for Unix systems and still today, all the build tools for the Git codebase assume you have standard Unix tools available in your path. If you have an open-source mindset and want to start contributing to Git, but primarily use a Windows machine, then you may have trouble getting started. This guide is for you.
Clone the GitForWindows repository on GitHub. It is helpful to create your own fork for storing your development branches.
Windows uses different line endings than Unix systems. See this GitHub article on working with line endings if you have trouble with line endings.
First, download and install the latest Git for Windows SDK (64-bit).
When complete, you can run the Git SDK, which creates a new Git Bash terminal window with
the additional development commands, such as make.
As of time of writing, the SDK uses a different credential manager, so you may still want to use normal Git
Bash for interacting with your remotes. Alternatively, use SSH rather than HTTPS and
avoid credential manager problems.
You should now be ready to type make from the root of your git source directory.
Here are some helpful variations:
make -j[N] DEVELOPER=1: Compile new sources using up to N concurrent processes. TheDEVELOPERflag turns on all warnings; code failing these warnings will not be accepted upstream ("upstream" = "the core Git project").make clean: Delete all compiled files.
When running make, you can use -j$(nproc) to automatically use the number of processors
on your machine as the number of concurrent build processes.
You can go deeper on the Windows-specific build process by reading the technical overview or the guide to compiling Git with Visual Studio.
The typical approach to building git is to use the standard Makefile with GCC, as
above. Developers working in a Windows environment may want to instead build with the
Microsoft Visual C++ compiler and libraries toolset (MSVC).
There are a few benefits to using MSVC over GCC during your development, including creating
symbols for debugging and performance tracing.
There are two ways to build Git for Windows using MSVC. Each have their own merits.
Use one of the following commands from the SDK Bash window to build Git for Windows:
make MSVC=1 -j12
make MSVC=1 DEBUG=1 -j12
The first form produces release-mode binaries; the second produces debug-mode binaries. Both forms produce PDB files and can be debugged. However, the first is best for perf tracing and the second is best for single-stepping.
You can then open Visual Studio and select File -> Open -> Project/Solution and select
the compiled git.exe file. This creates a basic solution and you can use the debugging
and performance tracing tools in Visual Studio to monitor a Git process. Use the Debug
Properties page to set the working directory and command line arguments.
Be sure to clean up before switching back to GCC (or to switch between debug and release MSVC builds):
make MSVC=1 -j12 clean
make MSVC=1 DEBUG=1 -j12 clean
If you prefer working in Visual Studio with a solution full of projects, then there is a
branch in Git for Windows called vs/master.
This branch is kept up-to-date with the master branch, except it has one more commit that
contains the solution and project files. Read the wiki page on this approach for more information.
I want to make a small warning before you start working on the vs/master branch. If you
create a new topic branch based on vs/master, you will need to rebase onto master before
you can submit a pull request. The commit at the tip of vs/master is not intended to ever
become part of the master branch. If you created a branch, myTopic based on vs/master,
then use the following rebase command to move it onto the master branch:
git rebase --onto master vs/master myTopic
Many new contributors ask: What should I start working on?
One way to win big with the open-source community is to look at the issues page and see if there are any issues that you can fix quickly, or if anything catches your eye.
You can also look at the unofficial Chromium issues page for multi-platform issues. You can look at recent user questions on the Git mailing list.
Or you can "scratch your own itch", i.e. address an issue you have with Git. The team at Microsoft where the Git for Windows maintainer works, for example, is focused almost entirely on improving performance. We approach our work by finding something that is slow and try to speed it up. We start our investigation by reliably reproducing the slow behavior, then running that example using the MSVC build and tracing the results in PerfView.
You could also think of something you wish Git could do, and make it do that thing! The only concern I would have with this approach is whether or not that feature is something the community also wants. If this excites you though, go for it! Don't be afraid to get involved in the mailing list early for feedback on the idea.
After you make your changes, it is important that you test your changes. Manual testing is important, but checking and extending the existing test suite is even more important. You want to run the functional tests to see if you broke something else during your change, and you want to extend the functional tests to be sure no one breaks your feature in the future.
Navigate to the t/ directory and type make to run all tests or use prove as
described in the Git for Windows wiki:
prove -j12 --state=failed,save ./t[0-9]*.sh
You can also run each test directly by running the corresponding shell script with a name
like tNNNN-descriptor.sh.
If you are adding new functionality, you may need to create unit tests by creating
helper commands that test a very limited action. These commands are stored in t/helpers.
When adding a helper, be sure to add a line to t/Makefile and to the .gitignore for the
binary file you add. The Git community prefers functional tests using the full git
executable, so try to exercise your new code using git commands before creating a test
helper.
To find out why a test failed, repeat the test with the -x -v -d -i options and then
navigate to the appropriate "trash" directory to see the data shape that was used for the
test failed step.
Read t/README for more details.
If you are working on improving performance, you will need to be acquainted with the
performance tests in t/perf. There are not too many performance tests yet, but adding one
as your first commit in a patch series helps to communicate the boost your change provides.
To check the change in performance across multiple versions of git, you can use the
t/perf/run script. For example, to compare the performance of git rev-list across the
core/master and core/next branches compared to a topic branch, you can run
cd t/perf
./run core/master core/next topic -- p0001-rev-list.sh
You can also set certain environment variables to help test the performance on different
repositories or with more repetitions. The full list is available in
the t/perf/README file,
but here are a few important ones:
GIT_PERF_REPO=/path/to/repo
GIT_PERF_LARGE_REPO=/path/to/large/repo
GIT_PERF_REPEAT_COUNT=10
When running the performance tests on Linux, you may see a message "Can't locate JSON.pm in
@INC" and that means you need to run sudo cpanm install JSON to get the JSON perl package.
For running performance tests, it can be helpful to set up a few repositories with strange data shapes, such as:
Many objects: Clone repos such as Kotlin, Linux, or Android.
Many pack-files: You can split a fresh clone into multiple pack-files of size at most
16MB by running git repack -adfF --max-pack-size=16m. See the
git repack documentation for more information.
You can count the number of pack-files using ls .git/objects/pack/*.pack | wc -l.
Many loose objects: If you already split your repository into multiple pack-files, then
you can pick one to split into loose objects using cat .git/objects/pack/[id].pack | git unpack-objects;
delete the [id].pack and [id].idx files after this. You can count the number of loose
bjects using ls .git/objects/??/* | wc -l.
Deep history: Usually large repositories also have deep histories, but you can use the test-many-commits-1m repo to target deep histories without the overhead of many objects. One issue with this repository: there are no merge commits, so you will need to use a different repository to test a "wide" commit history.
Large Index: You can generate a large index and repo by using the scripts in
t/perf/repos. There are two scripts. many-files.sh which will generate a repo with
same tree and blobs but different paths. Using many-files.sh -d 5 -w 10 -f 9 will create
a repo with ~1 million entries in the index. inflate-repo.sh will use an existing repo
and copy the current work tree until it is a specified size.
It can be important to work directly on the core Git codebase,
such as a recent commit into the master or next branch that has not been incorporated
into Git for Windows. Also, it can help to run functional and performance tests on your
code in Linux before submitting patches to the mailing list, which focuses on many platforms.
The differences between Windows and Linux are usually enough to catch most cross-platform
issues.
The Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) allows you to install Ubuntu Linux as an app that can run Linux executables on top of the Windows kernel. Internally, Linux syscalls are interpreted by the WSL, everything else is plain Ubuntu.
First, open WSL (either type "Bash" in Cortana, or execute "bash.exe" in a CMD window).
Then install the prerequisites, and git for the initial clone:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install git gcc make libssl-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev \
libexpat-dev tcl tk gettext git-email zlib1g-dev
Then, clone and build:
git clone https://github.com/git-for-windows/git
cd git
git remote add -f upstream https://github.com/git/git
make
Be sure to clone into /home/[user]/ and not into any folder under /mnt/?/ or your build
will fail due to colons in file names.
If you prefer, you can use a virtual machine (VM) to run Linux and test your changes in the full environment. The test suite runs a lot faster on Linux than on Windows or with the WSL. You can connect to the VM using an SSH terminal like PuTTY.
The following instructions are for using Hyper-V, which is available in some versions of Windows. There are many virtual machine alternatives available, if you do not have such a version installed.
- Download an Ubuntu Server ISO.
- Open Hyper-V Manager.
- Set up a virtual switch so your VM can reach the network.
- Select "Quick Create", name your machine, select the ISO as installation source, and un-check "This virtual machine will run Windows."
- Go through the Ubuntu install process, being sure to select to install OpenSSH Server.
- When install is complete, log in and check the SSH server status with
sudo service ssh status.- If the service is not found, install with
sudo apt-get install openssh-server. - If the service is not running, then use
sudo service ssh start.
- If the service is not found, install with
- Use
shutdown -h nowto shutdown the VM, go to the Hyper-V settings for the VM, expand Network Adapter to select "Advanced Features", and set the MAC address to be static (this can save your VM from losing network if shut down incorrectly). - Provide as many cores to your VM as you can (for parallel builds).
- Restart your VM, but do not connect.
- Use
sshin Git Bash, download PuTTY, or use your favorite SSH client to connect to the VM through SSH.
In order to build and use git, you will need the following libraries via apt-get:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install git gcc make libssl-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev \
libexpat-dev tcl tk gettext git-email zlib1g-dev
To get your code from your Windows machine to the Linux VM, it is easiest to push the branch to your fork of Git and clone your fork in the Linux VM.
Don't forget to set your git config with your preferred name, email, and editor.
Before submitting your patch, be sure to read the coding guidelines and check your code to match as best you can. This can be a lot of effort, but it saves time during review to avoid style issues.
The other possibly major difference between the mailing list submissions and GitHub PR workflows is that each commit will be reviewed independently. Even if you are submitting a patch series with multiple commits, each commit must stand on it's own and be reviewable by itself. Make sure the commit message clearly explain the why of the commit not the how. Describe what is wrong with the current code and how your changes have made the code better.
When preparing your patch, it is important to put yourself in the shoes of the Git community. Accepting a patch requires more justification than approving a pull request from someone on your team. The community has a stable product and is responsible for keeping it stable. If you introduce a bug, then they cannot count on you being around to fix it. When you decided to start work on a new feature, they were not part of the design discussion and may not even believe the feature is worth introducing.
Questions to answer in your patch message (and commit messages) may include:
- Why is this patch necessary?
- How does the current behavior cause pain for users?
- What kinds of repositories are necessary for noticing a difference?
- What design options did you consider before writing this version? Do you have links to code for those alternate designs?
- Is this a performance fix? Provide clear performance numbers for various well-known repos.
Here are some other tips that we use when cleaning up our commits:
- Commit messages should be wrapped at 76 columns per line (or less; 72 is also a common choice).
- Make sure the commits are signed off using
git commit (-s|--signoff). See SubmittingPatches for more details about what this sign-off means. - Check for whitespace errors using
git diff --check [base]...HEADorgit log --check. - Run
git rebase --whitespace=fixto correct upstream issues with whitespace. - Become familiar with interactive rebase (
git rebase -i) because you will be reordering, squashing, and editing commits as your patch or series of patches is reviewed. - Make sure any shell scripts that you add have the executable bit set on them. This is
usually for test files that you add in the
/tdirectory. You can usegit add --chmod=+x [file]to update it. You can test whether a file is marked as executable usinggit ls-files --stage \*.sh; the first number is 100755 for executable files. - Your commit titles should match the "area: change description" format. Rules of thumb:
- Choose ": " prefix appropriately.
- Keep the description short and to the point.
- The word that follows the ": " prefix is not capitalized.
- Do not include a full-stop at the end of the title.
- Read a few commit messages -- using
git log origin/master, for instance -- to become acquainted with the preferred commit message style.
- Build source using
make DEVELOPER=1for extra-strict compiler warnings.
Git for Windows accepts pull requests on GitHub, but these are reserved for Windows-specific improvements. For core Git, submissions are accepted on the Git mailing list.
There are a bunch of options for configuring the git send-email command. These options can
be found in the documentation for
git config and
git send-email.
git config --global sendemail.smtpserver <smtp server>
git config --global sendemail.smtpserverport 587
git config --global sendemail.smtpencryption tls
git config --global sendemail.smtpuser <email address>
To avoid storing your password in the config file, store it in the Git credential manager:
$ git credential fill
protocol=smtp
host=<stmp server>
username=<email address>
password=password
Before submitting a patch, read the Git documentation on submitting patches.
To construct a patch set, use the git format-patch command. There are three important options:
-
--cover-letter: If specified, create a[v#-]0000-cover-letter.patchfile that can be edited to describe the patch as a whole. If you previously added a branch description usinggit branch --edit-description, you will end up with a 0/N mail with that description and a nice overall diffstat. -
--in-reply-to=[Message-ID]: This will mark your cover letter as replying to the given message (which should correspond to your previous iteration). To determine the correct Message-ID, find the message you are replying to on public-inbox.org/git and take the ID from between the angle brackets. -
--subject-prefix=[prefix]: This defaults to [PATCH]. For subsequent iterations, you will want to override it like--subject-prefix="[PATCH v2]". You can also use the-voption to have it automatically generate the version number in the patches.
If you have multiple commits and use the --cover-letter option be sure to open the
0000-cover-letter.patch file to update the subject and add some details about the overall purpose
of the patch series.
To generate a single commit patch file:
git format-patch -s -o [dir] -1
To generate four patch files from the last three commits with a cover letter:
git format-patch --cover-letter -s -o [dir] HEAD~4
To generate version 3 with four patch files from the last four commits with a cover letter:
git format-patch --cover-letter -s -o [dir] -v 3 HEAD~4
Run git send-email, starting with a test email:
git send-email [email protected] [dir with patches]/*.patch
After checking the receipt of your test email, you can send to the list and to any potentially interested reviewers.
git send-email [email protected] --cc=<email1> --cc=<email2> [dir with patches]/*.patch
To submit a nth version patch (say version 3):
git send-email [email protected] --cc=<email1> --cc=<email2> \
--in-reply-to=<the message id of cover letter of patch v2> [dir with patches]/*.patch