GIT-FAST-IMPORT(1) Git Manual GIT-FAST-IMPORT(1)

NAME

git-fast-import - Backend for fast Git data importers

SYNOPSIS

frontend | git fast-import [<options>]

DESCRIPTION

This program is usually not what the end user wants to run directly.
Most end users want to use one of the existing frontend programs,
which parses a specific type of foreign source and feeds the contents
stored there to git fast-import.

fast-import reads a mixed command/data stream from standard input and
writes one or more packfiles directly into the current repository.
When EOF is received on standard input, fast import writes out
updated branch and tag refs, fully updating the current repository
with the newly imported data.

The fast-import backend itself can import into an empty repository
(one that has already been initialized by git init) or incrementally
update an existing populated repository. Whether or not incremental
imports are supported from a particular foreign source depends on the
frontend program in use.

OPTIONS

--force
Force updating modified existing branches, even if doing so would
cause commits to be lost (as the new commit does not contain the
old commit).

--quiet
Disable the output shown by --stats, making fast-import usually
be silent when it is successful. However, if the import stream
has directives intended to show user output (e.g. progress
directives), the corresponding messages will still be shown.

--stats
Display some basic statistics about the objects fast-import has
created, the packfiles they were stored into, and the memory used
by fast-import during this run. Showing this output is currently
the default, but can be disabled with --quiet.

--allow-unsafe-features
Many command-line options can be provided as part of the
fast-import stream itself by using the feature or option
commands. However, some of these options are unsafe (e.g.,
allowing fast-import to access the filesystem outside of the
repository). These options are disabled by default, but can be
allowed by providing this option on the command line. This
currently impacts only the export-marks, import-marks, and
import-marks-if-exists feature commands.

Only enable this option if you trust the program generating the
fast-import stream! This option is enabled automatically for
remote-helpers that use the `import` capability, as they are
already trusted to run their own code.

Options for Frontends

--cat-blob-fd=<fd>
Write responses to get-mark, cat-blob, and ls queries to the file
descriptor <fd> instead of stdout. Allows progress output
intended for the end-user to be separated from other output.

--date-format=<fmt>
Specify the type of dates the frontend will supply to fast-import
within author, committer and tagger commands. See "Date Formats"
below for details about which formats are supported, and their
syntax.

--done
Terminate with error if there is no done command at the end of
the stream. This option might be useful for detecting errors that
cause the frontend to terminate before it has started to write a
stream.

Locations of Marks Files

--export-marks=<file>
Dumps the internal marks table to <file> when complete. Marks are
written one per line as :markid SHA-1. Frontends can use this
file to validate imports after they have been completed, or to
save the marks table across incremental runs. As <file> is only
opened and truncated at checkpoint (or completion) the same path
can also be safely given to --import-marks.

--import-marks=<file>
Before processing any input, load the marks specified in <file>.
The input file must exist, must be readable, and must use the
same format as produced by --export-marks. Multiple options may
be supplied to import more than one set of marks. If a mark is
defined to different values, the last file wins.

--import-marks-if-exists=<file>
Like --import-marks but instead of erroring out, silently skips
the file if it does not exist.

--[no-]relative-marks
After specifying --relative-marks the paths specified with
--import-marks= and --export-marks= are relative to an internal
directory in the current repository. In git-fast-import this
means that the paths are relative to the .git/info/fast-import
directory. However, other importers may use a different location.

Relative and non-relative marks may be combined by interweaving
--(no-)-relative-marks with the --(import|export)-marks= options.

Submodule Rewriting

--rewrite-submodules-from=<name>:<file>,
--rewrite-submodules-to=<name>:<file>
Rewrite the object IDs for the submodule specified by <name> from
the values used in the from <file> to those used in the to
<file>. The from marks should have been created by git
fast-export, and the to marks should have been created by git
fast-import when importing that same submodule.

<name> may be any arbitrary string not containing a colon
character, but the same value must be used with both options when
specifying corresponding marks. Multiple submodules may be
specified with different values for <name>. It is an error not to
use these options in corresponding pairs.

These options are primarily useful when converting a repository
from one hash algorithm to another; without them, fast-import
will fail if it encounters a submodule because it has no way of
writing the object ID into the new hash algorithm.

Performance and Compression Tuning

--active-branches=<n>
Maximum number of branches to maintain active at once. See
"Memory Utilization" below for details. Default is 5.

--big-file-threshold=<n>
Maximum size of a blob that fast-import will attempt to create a
delta for, expressed in bytes. The default is 512m (512 MiB).
Some importers may wish to lower this on systems with constrained
memory.

--depth=<n>
Maximum delta depth, for blob and tree deltification. Default is
50.

--export-pack-edges=<file>
After creating a packfile, print a line of data to <file> listing
the filename of the packfile and the last commit on each branch
that was written to that packfile. This information may be useful
after importing projects whose total object set exceeds the 4 GiB
packfile limit, as these commits can be used as edge points
during calls to git pack-objects.

--max-pack-size=<n>
Maximum size of each output packfile. The default is unlimited.

fastimport.unpackLimit
See git-config(1)

PERFORMANCE

The design of fast-import allows it to import large projects in a
minimum amount of memory usage and processing time. Assuming the
frontend is able to keep up with fast-import and feed it a constant
stream of data, import times for projects holding 10+ years of
history and containing 100,000+ individual commits are generally
completed in just 1-2 hours on quite modest (~$2,000 USD) hardware.

Most bottlenecks appear to be in foreign source data access (the
source just cannot extract revisions fast enough) or disk IO
(fast-import writes as fast as the disk will take the data). Imports
will run faster if the source data is stored on a different drive
than the destination Git repository (due to less IO contention).

DEVELOPMENT COST

A typical frontend for fast-import tends to weigh in at approximately
200 lines of Perl/Python/Ruby code. Most developers have been able to
create working importers in just a couple of hours, even though it is
their first exposure to fast-import, and sometimes even to Git. This
is an ideal situation, given that most conversion tools are
throw-away (use once, and never look back).

PARALLEL OPERATION

Like git push or git fetch, imports handled by fast-import are safe
to run alongside parallel git repack -a -d or git gc invocations, or
any other Git operation (including git prune, as loose objects are
never used by fast-import).

fast-import does not lock the branch or tag refs it is actively
importing. After the import, during its ref update phase, fast-import
tests each existing branch ref to verify the update will be a
fast-forward update (the commit stored in the ref is contained in the
new history of the commit to be written). If the update is not a
fast-forward update, fast-import will skip updating that ref and
instead prints a warning message. fast-import will always attempt to
update all branch refs, and does not stop on the first failure.

Branch updates can be forced with --force, but it's recommended that
this only be used on an otherwise quiet repository. Using --force is
not necessary for an initial import into an empty repository.

TECHNICAL DISCUSSION

fast-import tracks a set of branches in memory. Any branch can be
created or modified at any point during the import process by sending
a commit command on the input stream. This design allows a frontend
program to process an unlimited number of branches simultaneously,
generating commits in the order they are available from the source
data. It also simplifies the frontend programs considerably.

fast-import does not use or alter the current working directory, or
any file within it. (It does however update the current Git
repository, as referenced by GIT_DIR.) Therefore an import frontend
may use the working directory for its own purposes, such as
extracting file revisions from the foreign source. This ignorance of
the working directory also allows fast-import to run very quickly, as
it does not need to perform any costly file update operations when
switching between branches.

INPUT FORMAT

With the exception of raw file data (which Git does not interpret)
the fast-import input format is text (ASCII) based. This text based
format simplifies development and debugging of frontend programs,
especially when a higher level language such as Perl, Python or Ruby
is being used.

fast-import is very strict about its input. Where we say SP below we
mean exactly one space. Likewise LF means one (and only one) linefeed
and HT one (and only one) horizontal tab. Supplying additional
whitespace characters will cause unexpected results, such as branch
names or file names with leading or trailing spaces in their name, or
early termination of fast-import when it encounters unexpected input.

Stream Comments

To aid in debugging frontends fast-import ignores any line that
begins with # (ASCII pound/hash) up to and including the line ending
LF. A comment line may contain any sequence of bytes that does not
contain an LF and therefore may be used to include any detailed
debugging information that might be specific to the frontend and
useful when inspecting a fast-import data stream.

Date Formats

The following date formats are supported. A frontend should select
the format it will use for this import by passing the format name in
the --date-format=<fmt> command-line option.

raw
This is the Git native format and is <time> SP <offutc>. It is
also fast-import's default format, if --date-format was not
specified.

The time of the event is specified by <time> as the number of
seconds since the UNIX epoch (midnight, Jan 1, 1970, UTC) and is
written as an ASCII decimal integer.

The local offset is specified by <offutc> as a positive or
negative offset from UTC. For example EST (which is 5 hours
behind UTC) would be expressed in <tz> by "-0500" while UTC is
"+0000". The local offset does not affect <time>; it is used only
as an advisement to help formatting routines display the
timestamp.

If the local offset is not available in the source material, use
"+0000", or the most common local offset. For example many
organizations have a CVS repository which has only ever been
accessed by users who are located in the same location and time
zone. In this case a reasonable offset from UTC could be assumed.

Unlike the rfc2822 format, this format is very strict. Any
variation in formatting will cause fast-import to reject the
value, and some sanity checks on the numeric values may also be
performed.

raw-permissive
This is the same as raw except that no sanity checks on the
numeric epoch and local offset are performed. This can be useful
when trying to filter or import an existing history with e.g.
bogus timezone values.

rfc2822
This is the standard date format as described by RFC 2822.

An example value is "Tue Feb 6 11:22:18 2007 -0500". The Git
parser is accurate, but a little on the lenient side. It is the
same parser used by git am when applying patches received from
email.

Some malformed strings may be accepted as valid dates. In some of
these cases Git will still be able to obtain the correct date
from the malformed string. There are also some types of malformed
strings which Git will parse wrong, and yet consider valid.
Seriously malformed strings will be rejected.

Unlike the raw format above, the time zone/UTC offset information
contained in an RFC 2822 date string is used to adjust the date
value to UTC prior to storage. Therefore it is important that
this information be as accurate as possible.

If the source material uses RFC 2822 style dates, the frontend
should let fast-import handle the parsing and conversion (rather
than attempting to do it itself) as the Git parser has been well
tested in the wild.

Frontends should prefer the raw format if the source material
already uses UNIX-epoch format, can be coaxed to give dates in
that format, or its format is easily convertible to it, as there
is no ambiguity in parsing.

now
Always use the current time and time zone. The literal now must
always be supplied for <when>.

This is a toy format. The current time and time zone of this
system is always copied into the identity string at the time it
is being created by fast-import. There is no way to specify a
different time or time zone.

This particular format is supplied as it's short to implement and
may be useful to a process that wants to create a new commit
right now, without needing to use a working directory or git
update-index.

If separate author and committer commands are used in a commit
the timestamps may not match, as the system clock will be polled
twice (once for each command). The only way to ensure that both
author and committer identity information has the same timestamp
is to omit author (thus copying from committer) or to use a date
format other than now.

Commands

fast-import accepts several commands to update the current repository
and control the current import process. More detailed discussion
(with examples) of each command follows later.

commit
Creates a new branch or updates an existing branch by creating a
new commit and updating the branch to point at the newly created
commit.

tag
Creates an annotated tag object from an existing commit or
branch. Lightweight tags are not supported by this command, as
they are not recommended for recording meaningful points in time.

reset
Reset an existing branch (or a new branch) to a specific
revision. This command must be used to change a branch to a
specific revision without making a commit on it.

blob
Convert raw file data into a blob, for future use in a commit
command. This command is optional and is not needed to perform an
import.

alias
Record that a mark refers to a given object without first
creating any new object. Using --import-marks and referring to
missing marks will cause fast-import to fail, so aliases can
provide a way to set otherwise pruned commits to a valid value
(e.g. the nearest non-pruned ancestor).

checkpoint
Forces fast-import to close the current packfile, generate its
unique SHA-1 checksum and index, and start a new packfile. This
command is optional and is not needed to perform an import.

progress
Causes fast-import to echo the entire line to its own standard
output. This command is optional and is not needed to perform an
import.

done
Marks the end of the stream. This command is optional unless the
done feature was requested using the --done command-line option
or feature done command.

get-mark
Causes fast-import to print the SHA-1 corresponding to a mark to
the file descriptor set with --cat-blob-fd, or stdout if
unspecified.

cat-blob
Causes fast-import to print a blob in cat-file --batch format to
the file descriptor set with --cat-blob-fd or stdout if
unspecified.

ls
Causes fast-import to print a line describing a directory entry
in ls-tree format to the file descriptor set with --cat-blob-fd
or stdout if unspecified.

feature
Enable the specified feature. This requires that fast-import
supports the specified feature, and aborts if it does not.

option
Specify any of the options listed under OPTIONS that do not
change stream semantic to suit the frontend's needs. This command
is optional and is not needed to perform an import.

commit
Create or update a branch with a new commit, recording one logical
change to the project.

'commit' SP <ref> LF
mark?
original-oid?
('author' (SP <name>)? SP LT <email> GT SP <when> LF)?
'committer' (SP <name>)? SP LT <email> GT SP <when> LF
('encoding' SP <encoding>)?
data
('from' SP <commit-ish> LF)?
('merge' SP <commit-ish> LF)*
(filemodify | filedelete | filecopy | filerename | filedeleteall | notemodify)*
LF?

where <ref> is the name of the branch to make the commit on.
Typically branch names are prefixed with refs/heads/ in Git, so
importing the CVS branch symbol RELENG-1_0 would use
refs/heads/RELENG-1_0 for the value of <ref>. The value of <ref> must
be a valid refname in Git. As LF is not valid in a Git refname, no
quoting or escaping syntax is supported here.

A mark command may optionally appear, requesting fast-import to save
a reference to the newly created commit for future use by the
frontend (see below for format). It is very common for frontends to
mark every commit they create, thereby allowing future branch
creation from any imported commit.

The data command following committer must supply the commit message
(see below for data command syntax). To import an empty commit
message use a 0 length data. Commit messages are free-form and are
not interpreted by Git. Currently they must be encoded in UTF-8, as
fast-import does not permit other encodings to be specified.

Zero or more filemodify, filedelete, filecopy, filerename,
filedeleteall and notemodify commands may be included to update the
contents of the branch prior to creating the commit. These commands
may be supplied in any order. However it is recommended that a
filedeleteall command precede all filemodify, filecopy, filerename
and notemodify commands in the same commit, as filedeleteall wipes
the branch clean (see below).

The LF after the command is optional (it used to be required). Note
that for reasons of backward compatibility, if the commit ends with a
data command (i.e. it has no from, merge, filemodify, filedelete,
filecopy, filerename, filedeleteall or notemodify commands) then two
LF commands may appear at the end of the command instead of just one.

author

An author command may optionally appear, if the author
information might differ from the committer information. If
author is omitted then fast-import will automatically use the
committer's information for the author portion of the commit. See
below for a description of the fields in author, as they are
identical to committer.

committer

The committer command indicates who made this commit, and when
they made it.

Here <name> is the person's display name (for example "Com M
Itter") and <email> is the person's email address
("cm@example.com"). LT and GT are the literal less-than (\x3c)
and greater-than (\x3e) symbols. These are required to delimit
the email address from the other fields in the line. Note that
<name> and <email> are free-form and may contain any sequence of
bytes, except LT, GT and LF. <name> is typically UTF-8 encoded.

The time of the change is specified by <when> using the date
format that was selected by the --date-format=<fmt> command-line
option. See "Date Formats" above for the set of supported
formats, and their syntax.

encoding

The optional encoding command indicates the encoding of the
commit message. Most commits are UTF-8 and the encoding is
omitted, but this allows importing commit messages into git
without first reencoding them.

from

The from command is used to specify the commit to initialize this
branch from. This revision will be the first ancestor of the new
commit. The state of the tree built at this commit will begin
with the state at the from commit, and be altered by the content
modifications in this commit.

Omitting the from command in the first commit of a new branch
will cause fast-import to create that commit with no ancestor.
This tends to be desired only for the initial commit of a
project. If the frontend creates all files from scratch when
making a new branch, a merge command may be used instead of from
to start the commit with an empty tree. Omitting the from command
on existing branches is usually desired, as the current commit on
that branch is automatically assumed to be the first ancestor of
the new commit.

As LF is not valid in a Git refname or SHA-1 expression, no
quoting or escaping syntax is supported within <commit-ish>.

Here <commit-ish> is any of the following:

+o The name of an existing branch already in fast-import's
internal branch table. If fast-import doesn't know the name,
it's treated as a SHA-1 expression.

+o A mark reference, :<idnum>, where <idnum> is the mark number.

The reason fast-import uses : to denote a mark reference is
this character is not legal in a Git branch name. The leading
: makes it easy to distinguish between the mark 42 (:42) and
the branch 42 (42 or refs/heads/42), or an abbreviated SHA-1
which happened to consist only of base-10 digits.

Marks must be declared (via mark) before they can be used.

+o A complete 40 byte or abbreviated commit SHA-1 in hex.

+o Any valid Git SHA-1 expression that resolves to a commit. See
"SPECIFYING REVISIONS" in gitrevisions(7) for details.

+o The special null SHA-1 (40 zeros) specifies that the branch
is to be removed.

The special case of restarting an incremental import from the
current branch value should be written as:

from refs/heads/branch^0

The ^0 suffix is necessary as fast-import does not permit a
branch to start from itself, and the branch is created in memory
before the from command is even read from the input. Adding ^0
will force fast-import to resolve the commit through Git's
revision parsing library, rather than its internal branch table,
thereby loading in the existing value of the branch.

merge

Includes one additional ancestor commit. The additional ancestry
link does not change the way the tree state is built at this
commit. If the from command is omitted when creating a new
branch, the first merge commit will be the first ancestor of the
current commit, and the branch will start out with no files. An
unlimited number of merge commands per commit are permitted by
fast-import, thereby establishing an n-way merge.

Here <commit-ish> is any of the commit specification expressions
also accepted by from (see above).

filemodify

Included in a commit command to add a new file or change the
content of an existing file. This command has two different means
of specifying the content of the file.

External data format
The data content for the file was already supplied by a prior
blob command. The frontend just needs to connect it.

'M' SP <mode> SP <dataref> SP <path> LF

Here usually <dataref> must be either a mark reference
(:<idnum>) set by a prior blob command, or a full 40-byte
SHA-1 of an existing Git blob object. If <mode> is 040000`
then <dataref> must be the full 40-byte SHA-1 of an existing
Git tree object or a mark reference set with --import-marks.

Inline data format
The data content for the file has not been supplied yet. The
frontend wants to supply it as part of this modify command.

'M' SP <mode> SP 'inline' SP <path> LF
data

See below for a detailed description of the data command.

In both formats <mode> is the type of file entry, specified in
octal. Git only supports the following modes:

+o 100644 or 644: A normal (not-executable) file. The majority
of files in most projects use this mode. If in doubt, this is
what you want.

+o 100755 or 755: A normal, but executable, file.

+o 120000: A symlink, the content of the file will be the link
target.

+o 160000: A gitlink, SHA-1 of the object refers to a commit in
another repository. Git links can only be specified either by
SHA or through a commit mark. They are used to implement
submodules.

+o 040000: A subdirectory. Subdirectories can only be specified
by SHA or through a tree mark set with --import-marks.

In both formats <path> is the complete path of the file to be
added (if not already existing) or modified (if already
existing).

A <path> can be written as unquoted bytes or a C-style quoted
string.

When a <path> does not start with a double quote ("), it is an
unquoted string and is parsed as literal bytes without any escape
sequences. However, if the filename contains LF or starts with
double quote, it cannot be represented as an unquoted string and
must be quoted. Additionally, the source <path> in filecopy or
filerename must be quoted if it contains SP.

When a <path> starts with a double quote ("), it is a C-style
quoted string, where the complete filename is enclosed in a pair
of double quotes and escape sequences are used. Certain
characters must be escaped by preceding them with a backslash: LF
is written as \n, backslash as \\, and double quote as \". Some
characters may optionally be written with escape sequences: \a
for bell, \b for backspace, \f for form feed, \n for line feed,
\r for carriage return, \t for horizontal tab, and \v for
vertical tab. Any byte can be written with 3-digit octal codes
(e.g., \033). All filenames can be represented as quoted strings.

A <path> must use UNIX-style directory separators (forward slash
/) and its value must be in canonical form. That is it must not:

+o contain an empty directory component (e.g. foo//bar is
invalid),

+o end with a directory separator (e.g. foo/ is invalid),

+o start with a directory separator (e.g. /foo is invalid),

+o contain the special component . or .. (e.g. foo/./bar and
foo/../bar are invalid).

The root of the tree can be represented by an empty string as
<path>.

<path> cannot contain NUL, either literally or escaped as \000.
It is recommended that <path> always be encoded using UTF-8.

filedelete

Included in a commit command to remove a file or recursively
delete an entire directory from the branch. If the file or
directory removal makes its parent directory empty, the parent
directory will be automatically removed too. This cascades up the
tree until the first non-empty directory or the root is reached.

'D' SP <path> LF

here <path> is the complete path of the file or subdirectory to
be removed from the branch. See filemodify above for a detailed
description of <path>.

filecopy

Recursively copies an existing file or subdirectory to a
different location within the branch. The existing file or
directory must exist. If the destination exists it will be
completely replaced by the content copied from the source.

'C' SP <path> SP <path> LF

here the first <path> is the source location and the second
<path> is the destination. See filemodify above for a detailed
description of what <path> may look like. To use a source path
that contains SP the path must be quoted.

A filecopy command takes effect immediately. Once the source
location has been copied to the destination any future commands
applied to the source location will not impact the destination of
the copy.

filerename

Renames an existing file or subdirectory to a different location
within the branch. The existing file or directory must exist. If
the destination exists it will be replaced by the source
directory.

'R' SP <path> SP <path> LF

here the first <path> is the source location and the second
<path> is the destination. See filemodify above for a detailed
description of what <path> may look like. To use a source path
that contains SP the path must be quoted.

A filerename command takes effect immediately. Once the source
location has been renamed to the destination any future commands
applied to the source location will create new files there and
not impact the destination of the rename.

Note that a filerename is the same as a filecopy followed by a
filedelete of the source location. There is a slight performance
advantage to using filerename, but the advantage is so small that
it is never worth trying to convert a delete/add pair in source
material into a rename for fast-import. This filerename command
is provided just to simplify frontends that already have rename
information and don't want bother with decomposing it into a
filecopy followed by a filedelete.

filedeleteall

Included in a commit command to remove all files (and also all
directories) from the branch. This command resets the internal
branch structure to have no files in it, allowing the frontend to
subsequently add all interesting files from scratch.

'deleteall' LF

This command is extremely useful if the frontend does not know
(or does not care to know) what files are currently on the
branch, and therefore cannot generate the proper filedelete
commands to update the content.

Issuing a filedeleteall followed by the needed filemodify
commands to set the correct content will produce the same results
as sending only the needed filemodify and filedelete commands.
The filedeleteall approach may however require fast-import to use
slightly more memory per active branch (less than 1 MiB for even
most large projects); so frontends that can easily obtain only
the affected paths for a commit are encouraged to do so.

notemodify

Included in a commit <notes-ref> command to add a new note
annotating a <commit-ish> or change this annotation contents.
Internally it is similar to filemodify 100644 on <commit-ish>
path (maybe split into subdirectories). It's not advised to use
any other commands to write to the <notes-ref> tree except
filedeleteall to delete all existing notes in this tree. This
command has two different means of specifying the content of the
note.

External data format
The data content for the note was already supplied by a prior
blob command. The frontend just needs to connect it to the
commit that is to be annotated.

'N' SP <dataref> SP <commit-ish> LF

Here <dataref> can be either a mark reference (:<idnum>) set
by a prior blob command, or a full 40-byte SHA-1 of an
existing Git blob object.

Inline data format
The data content for the note has not been supplied yet. The
frontend wants to supply it as part of this modify command.

'N' SP 'inline' SP <commit-ish> LF
data

See below for a detailed description of the data command.

In both formats <commit-ish> is any of the commit specification
expressions also accepted by from (see above).

mark
Arranges for fast-import to save a reference to the current object,
allowing the frontend to recall this object at a future point in
time, without knowing its SHA-1. Here the current object is the
object creation command the mark command appears within. This can be
commit, tag, and blob, but commit is the most common usage.

'mark' SP ':' <idnum> LF

where <idnum> is the number assigned by the frontend to this mark.
The value of <idnum> is expressed as an ASCII decimal integer. The
value 0 is reserved and cannot be used as a mark. Only values greater
than or equal to 1 may be used as marks.

New marks are created automatically. Existing marks can be moved to
another object simply by reusing the same <idnum> in another mark
command.

original-oid
Provides the name of the object in the original source control
system. fast-import will simply ignore this directive, but filter
processes which operate on and modify the stream before feeding to
fast-import may have uses for this information

'original-oid' SP <object-identifier> LF

where <object-identifier> is any string not containing LF.

tag
Creates an annotated tag referring to a specific commit. To create
lightweight (non-annotated) tags see the reset command below.

'tag' SP <name> LF
mark?
'from' SP <commit-ish> LF
original-oid?
'tagger' (SP <name>)? SP LT <email> GT SP <when> LF
data

where <name> is the name of the tag to create.

Tag names are automatically prefixed with refs/tags/ when stored in
Git, so importing the CVS branch symbol RELENG-1_0-FINAL would use
just RELENG-1_0-FINAL for <name>, and fast-import will write the
corresponding ref as refs/tags/RELENG-1_0-FINAL.

The value of <name> must be a valid refname in Git and therefore may
contain forward slashes. As LF is not valid in a Git refname, no
quoting or escaping syntax is supported here.

The from command is the same as in the commit command; see above for
details.

The tagger command uses the same format as committer within commit;
again see above for details.

The data command following tagger must supply the annotated tag
message (see below for data command syntax). To import an empty tag
message use a 0 length data. Tag messages are free-form and are not
interpreted by Git. Currently they must be encoded in UTF-8, as
fast-import does not permit other encodings to be specified.

Signing annotated tags during import from within fast-import is not
supported. Trying to include your own PGP/GPG signature is not
recommended, as the frontend does not (easily) have access to the
complete set of bytes which normally goes into such a signature. If
signing is required, create lightweight tags from within fast-import
with reset, then create the annotated versions of those tags offline
with the standard git tag process.

reset
Creates (or recreates) the named branch, optionally starting from a
specific revision. The reset command allows a frontend to issue a new
from command for an existing branch, or to create a new branch from
an existing commit without creating a new commit.

'reset' SP <ref> LF
('from' SP <commit-ish> LF)?
LF?

For a detailed description of <ref> and <commit-ish> see above under
commit and from.

The LF after the command is optional (it used to be required).

The reset command can also be used to create lightweight
(non-annotated) tags. For example:

reset refs/tags/938
from :938

would create the lightweight tag refs/tags/938 referring to whatever
commit mark :938 references.

blob
Requests writing one file revision to the packfile. The revision is
not connected to any commit; this connection must be formed in a
subsequent commit command by referencing the blob through an assigned
mark.

'blob' LF
mark?
original-oid?
data

The mark command is optional here as some frontends have chosen to
generate the Git SHA-1 for the blob on their own, and feed that
directly to commit. This is typically more work than it's worth
however, as marks are inexpensive to store and easy to use.

data
Supplies raw data (for use as blob/file content, commit messages, or
annotated tag messages) to fast-import. Data can be supplied using an
exact byte count or delimited with a terminating line. Real frontends
intended for production-quality conversions should always use the
exact byte count format, as it is more robust and performs better.
The delimited format is intended primarily for testing fast-import.

Comment lines appearing within the <raw> part of data commands are
always taken to be part of the body of the data and are therefore
never ignored by fast-import. This makes it safe to import any
file/message content whose lines might start with #.

Exact byte count format
The frontend must specify the number of bytes of data.

'data' SP <count> LF
<raw> LF?

where <count> is the exact number of bytes appearing within
<raw>. The value of <count> is expressed as an ASCII decimal
integer. The LF on either side of <raw> is not included in
<count> and will not be included in the imported data.

The LF after <raw> is optional (it used to be required) but
recommended. Always including it makes debugging a fast-import
stream easier as the next command always starts in column 0 of
the next line, even if <raw> did not end with an LF.

Delimited format
A delimiter string is used to mark the end of the data.
fast-import will compute the length by searching for the
delimiter. This format is primarily useful for testing and is not
recommended for real data.

'data' SP '<<' <delim> LF
<raw> LF
<delim> LF
LF?

where <delim> is the chosen delimiter string. The string <delim>
must not appear on a line by itself within <raw>, as otherwise
fast-import will think the data ends earlier than it really does.
The LF immediately trailing <raw> is part of <raw>. This is one
of the limitations of the delimited format, it is impossible to
supply a data chunk which does not have an LF as its last byte.

The LF after <delim> LF is optional (it used to be required).

alias
Record that a mark refers to a given object without first creating
any new object.

'alias' LF
mark
'to' SP <commit-ish> LF
LF?

For a detailed description of <commit-ish> see above under from.

checkpoint
Forces fast-import to close the current packfile, start a new one,
and to save out all current branch refs, tags and marks.

'checkpoint' LF
LF?

Note that fast-import automatically switches packfiles when the
current packfile reaches --max-pack-size, or 4 GiB, whichever limit
is smaller. During an automatic packfile switch fast-import does not
update the branch refs, tags or marks.

As a checkpoint can require a significant amount of CPU time and disk
IO (to compute the overall pack SHA-1 checksum, generate the
corresponding index file, and update the refs) it can easily take
several minutes for a single checkpoint command to complete.

Frontends may choose to issue checkpoints during extremely large and
long running imports, or when they need to allow another Git process
access to a branch. However given that a 30 GiB Subversion repository
can be loaded into Git through fast-import in about 3 hours, explicit
checkpointing may not be necessary.

The LF after the command is optional (it used to be required).

progress
Causes fast-import to print the entire progress line unmodified to
its standard output channel (file descriptor 1) when the command is
processed from the input stream. The command otherwise has no impact
on the current import, or on any of fast-import's internal state.

'progress' SP <any> LF
LF?

The <any> part of the command may contain any sequence of bytes that
does not contain LF. The LF after the command is optional. Callers
may wish to process the output through a tool such as sed to remove
the leading part of the line, for example:

frontend | git fast-import | sed 's/^progress //'

Placing a progress command immediately after a checkpoint will inform
the reader when the checkpoint has been completed and it can safely
access the refs that fast-import updated.

get-mark
Causes fast-import to print the SHA-1 corresponding to a mark to
stdout or to the file descriptor previously arranged with the
--cat-blob-fd argument. The command otherwise has no impact on the
current import; its purpose is to retrieve SHA-1s that later commits
might want to refer to in their commit messages.

'get-mark' SP ':' <idnum> LF

See "Responses To Commands" below for details about how to read this
output safely.

cat-blob
Causes fast-import to print a blob to a file descriptor previously
arranged with the --cat-blob-fd argument. The command otherwise has
no impact on the current import; its main purpose is to retrieve
blobs that may be in fast-import's memory but not accessible from the
target repository.

'cat-blob' SP <dataref> LF

The <dataref> can be either a mark reference (:<idnum>) set
previously or a full 40-byte SHA-1 of a Git blob, preexisting or
ready to be written.

Output uses the same format as git cat-file --batch:

<sha1> SP 'blob' SP <size> LF
<contents> LF

This command can be used where a filemodify directive can appear,
allowing it to be used in the middle of a commit. For a filemodify
using an inline directive, it can also appear right before the data
directive.

See "Responses To Commands" below for details about how to read this
output safely.

ls
Prints information about the object at a path to a file descriptor
previously arranged with the --cat-blob-fd argument. This allows
printing a blob from the active commit (with cat-blob) or copying a
blob or tree from a previous commit for use in the current one (with
filemodify).

The ls command can also be used where a filemodify directive can
appear, allowing it to be used in the middle of a commit.

Reading from the active commit
This form can only be used in the middle of a commit. The path
names a directory entry within fast-import's active commit. The
path must be quoted in this case.

'ls' SP <path> LF

Reading from a named tree
The <dataref> can be a mark reference (:<idnum>) or the full
40-byte SHA-1 of a Git tag, commit, or tree object, preexisting
or waiting to be written. The path is relative to the top level
of the tree named by <dataref>.

'ls' SP <dataref> SP <path> LF

See filemodify above for a detailed description of <path>.

Output uses the same format as git ls-tree <tree> -- <path>:

<mode> SP ('blob' | 'tree' | 'commit') SP <dataref> HT <path> LF

The <dataref> represents the blob, tree, or commit object at <path>
and can be used in later get-mark, cat-blob, filemodify, or ls
commands.

If there is no file or subtree at that path, git fast-import will
instead report

missing SP <path> LF

See "Responses To Commands" below for details about how to read this
output safely.

feature
Require that fast-import supports the specified feature, or abort if
it does not.

'feature' SP <feature> ('=' <argument>)? LF

The <feature> part of the command may be any one of the following:

date-format, export-marks, relative-marks, no-relative-marks, force
Act as though the corresponding command-line option with a
leading -- was passed on the command line (see OPTIONS, above).

import-marks, import-marks-if-exists
Like --import-marks except in two respects: first, only one
"feature import-marks" or "feature import-marks-if-exists"
command is allowed per stream; second, an --import-marks= or
--import-marks-if-exists command-line option overrides any of
these "feature" commands in the stream; third, "feature
import-marks-if-exists" like a corresponding command-line option
silently skips a nonexistent file.

get-mark, cat-blob, ls
Require that the backend support the get-mark, cat-blob, or ls
command respectively. Versions of fast-import not supporting the
specified command will exit with a message indicating so. This
lets the import error out early with a clear message, rather than
wasting time on the early part of an import before the
unsupported command is detected.

notes
Require that the backend support the notemodify (N) subcommand to
the commit command. Versions of fast-import not supporting notes
will exit with a message indicating so.

done
Error out if the stream ends without a done command. Without this
feature, errors causing the frontend to end abruptly at a
convenient point in the stream can go undetected. This may occur,
for example, if an import front end dies in mid-operation without
emitting SIGTERM or SIGKILL at its subordinate git fast-import
instance.

option
Processes the specified option so that git fast-import behaves in a
way that suits the frontend's needs. Note that options specified by
the frontend are overridden by any options the user may specify to
git fast-import itself.

'option' SP <option> LF

The <option> part of the command may contain any of the options
listed in the OPTIONS section that do not change import semantics,
without the leading -- and is treated in the same way.

Option commands must be the first commands on the input (not counting
feature commands), to give an option command after any non-option
command is an error.

The following command-line options change import semantics and may
therefore not be passed as option:

+o date-format

+o import-marks

+o export-marks

+o cat-blob-fd

+o force

done
If the done feature is not in use, treated as if EOF was read. This
can be used to tell fast-import to finish early.

If the --done command-line option or feature done command is in use,
the done command is mandatory and marks the end of the stream.

RESPONSES TO COMMANDS

New objects written by fast-import are not available immediately.
Most fast-import commands have no visible effect until the next
checkpoint (or completion). The frontend can send commands to fill
fast-import's input pipe without worrying about how quickly they will
take effect, which improves performance by simplifying scheduling.

For some frontends, though, it is useful to be able to read back data
from the current repository as it is being updated (for example when
the source material describes objects in terms of patches to be
applied to previously imported objects). This can be accomplished by
connecting the frontend and fast-import via bidirectional pipes:

mkfifo fast-import-output
frontend <fast-import-output |
git fast-import >fast-import-output

A frontend set up this way can use progress, get-mark, ls, and
cat-blob commands to read information from the import in progress.

To avoid deadlock, such frontends must completely consume any pending
output from progress, ls, get-mark, and cat-blob before performing
writes to fast-import that might block.

CRASH REPORTS

If fast-import is supplied invalid input it will terminate with a
non-zero exit status and create a crash report in the top level of
the Git repository it was importing into. Crash reports contain a
snapshot of the internal fast-import state as well as the most recent
commands that lead up to the crash.

All recent commands (including stream comments, file changes and
progress commands) are shown in the command history within the crash
report, but raw file data and commit messages are excluded from the
crash report. This exclusion saves space within the report file and
reduces the amount of buffering that fast-import must perform during
execution.

After writing a crash report fast-import will close the current
packfile and export the marks table. This allows the frontend
developer to inspect the repository state and resume the import from
the point where it crashed. The modified branches and tags are not
updated during a crash, as the import did not complete successfully.
Branch and tag information can be found in the crash report and must
be applied manually if the update is needed.

An example crash:

$ cat >in <<END_OF_INPUT
# my very first test commit
commit refs/heads/master
committer Shawn O. Pearce <spearce> 19283 -0400
# who is that guy anyway?
data <<EOF
this is my commit
EOF
M 644 inline .gitignore
data <<EOF
.gitignore
EOF
M 777 inline bob
END_OF_INPUT

$ git fast-import <in
fatal: Corrupt mode: M 777 inline bob
fast-import: dumping crash report to .git/fast_import_crash_8434

$ cat .git/fast_import_crash_8434
fast-import crash report:
fast-import process: 8434
parent process : 1391
at Sat Sep 1 00:58:12 2007

fatal: Corrupt mode: M 777 inline bob

Most Recent Commands Before Crash
---------------------------------
# my very first test commit
commit refs/heads/master
committer Shawn O. Pearce <spearce> 19283 -0400
# who is that guy anyway?
data <<EOF
M 644 inline .gitignore
data <<EOF
* M 777 inline bob

Active Branch LRU
-----------------
active_branches = 1 cur, 5 max

pos clock name
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
1) 0 refs/heads/master

Inactive Branches
-----------------
refs/heads/master:
status : active loaded dirty
tip commit : 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000
old tree : 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000
cur tree : 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000
commit clock: 0
last pack :

-------------------
END OF CRASH REPORT

TIPS AND TRICKS

The following tips and tricks have been collected from various users
of fast-import, and are offered here as suggestions.

Use One Mark Per Commit

When doing a repository conversion, use a unique mark per commit
(mark :<n>) and supply the --export-marks option on the command line.
fast-import will dump a file which lists every mark and the Git
object SHA-1 that corresponds to it. If the frontend can tie the
marks back to the source repository, it is easy to verify the
accuracy and completeness of the import by comparing each Git commit
to the corresponding source revision.

Coming from a system such as Perforce or Subversion, this should be
quite simple, as the fast-import mark can also be the Perforce
changeset number or the Subversion revision number.

Freely Skip Around Branches

Don't bother trying to optimize the frontend to stick to one branch
at a time during an import. Although doing so might be slightly
faster for fast-import, it tends to increase the complexity of the
frontend code considerably.

The branch LRU builtin to fast-import tends to behave very well, and
the cost of activating an inactive branch is so low that bouncing
around between branches has virtually no impact on import
performance.

Handling Renames

When importing a renamed file or directory, simply delete the old
name(s) and modify the new name(s) during the corresponding commit.
Git performs rename detection after-the-fact, rather than explicitly
during a commit.

Use Tag Fixup Branches

Some other SCM systems let the user create a tag from multiple files
which are not from the same commit/changeset. Or to create tags which
are a subset of the files available in the repository.

Importing these tags as-is in Git is impossible without making at
least one commit which "fixes up" the files to match the content of
the tag. Use fast-import's reset command to reset a dummy branch
outside of your normal branch space to the base commit for the tag,
then commit one or more file fixup commits, and finally tag the dummy
branch.

For example since all normal branches are stored under refs/heads/
name the tag fixup branch TAG_FIXUP. This way it is impossible for
the fixup branch used by the importer to have namespace conflicts
with real branches imported from the source (the name TAG_FIXUP is
not refs/heads/TAG_FIXUP).

When committing fixups, consider using merge to connect the commit(s)
which are supplying file revisions to the fixup branch. Doing so will
allow tools such as git blame to track through the real commit
history and properly annotate the source files.

After fast-import terminates the frontend will need to do rm
.git/TAG_FIXUP to remove the dummy branch.

Import Now, Repack Later
As soon as fast-import completes the Git repository is completely
valid and ready for use. Typically this takes only a very short time,
even for considerably large projects (100,000+ commits).

However repacking the repository is necessary to improve data
locality and access performance. It can also take hours on extremely
large projects (especially if -f and a large --window parameter is
used). Since repacking is safe to run alongside readers and writers,
run the repack in the background and let it finish when it finishes.
There is no reason to wait to explore your new Git project!

If you choose to wait for the repack, don't try to run benchmarks or
performance tests until repacking is completed. fast-import outputs
suboptimal packfiles that are simply never seen in real use
situations.

Repacking Historical Data

If you are repacking very old imported data (e.g. older than the last
year), consider expending some extra CPU time and supplying
--window=50 (or higher) when you run git repack. This will take
longer, but will also produce a smaller packfile. You only need to
expend the effort once, and everyone using your project will benefit
from the smaller repository.

Include Some Progress Messages

Every once in a while have your frontend emit a progress message to
fast-import. The contents of the messages are entirely free-form, so
one suggestion would be to output the current month and year each
time the current commit date moves into the next month. Your users
will feel better knowing how much of the data stream has been
processed.

PACKFILE OPTIMIZATION

When packing a blob fast-import always attempts to deltify against
the last blob written. Unless specifically arranged for by the
frontend, this will probably not be a prior version of the same file,
so the generated delta will not be the smallest possible. The
resulting packfile will be compressed, but will not be optimal.

Frontends which have efficient access to all revisions of a single
file (for example reading an RCS/CVS ,v file) can choose to supply
all revisions of that file as a sequence of consecutive blob
commands. This allows fast-import to deltify the different file
revisions against each other, saving space in the final packfile.
Marks can be used to later identify individual file revisions during
a sequence of commit commands.

The packfile(s) created by fast-import do not encourage good disk
access patterns. This is caused by fast-import writing the data in
the order it is received on standard input, while Git typically
organizes data within packfiles to make the most recent (current tip)
data appear before historical data. Git also clusters commits
together, speeding up revision traversal through better cache
locality.

For this reason it is strongly recommended that users repack the
repository with git repack -a -d after fast-import completes,
allowing Git to reorganize the packfiles for faster data access. If
blob deltas are suboptimal (see above) then also adding the -f option
to force recomputation of all deltas can significantly reduce the
final packfile size (30-50% smaller can be quite typical).

Instead of running git repack you can also run git gc --aggressive,
which will also optimize other things after an import (e.g. pack
loose refs). As noted in the "AGGRESSIVE" section in git-gc(1) the
--aggressive option will find new deltas with the -f option to git-
repack(1). For the reasons elaborated on above using --aggressive
after a fast-import is one of the few cases where it's known to be
worthwhile.

MEMORY UTILIZATION

There are a number of factors which affect how much memory
fast-import requires to perform an import. Like critical sections of
core Git, fast-import uses its own memory allocators to amortize any
overheads associated with malloc. In practice fast-import tends to
amortize any malloc overheads to 0, due to its use of large block
allocations.

per object
fast-import maintains an in-memory structure for every object written
in this execution. On a 32 bit system the structure is 32 bytes, on a
64 bit system the structure is 40 bytes (due to the larger pointer
sizes). Objects in the table are not deallocated until fast-import
terminates. Importing 2 million objects on a 32 bit system will
require approximately 64 MiB of memory.

The object table is actually a hashtable keyed on the object name
(the unique SHA-1). This storage configuration allows fast-import to
reuse an existing or already written object and avoid writing
duplicates to the output packfile. Duplicate blobs are surprisingly
common in an import, typically due to branch merges in the source.

per mark
Marks are stored in a sparse array, using 1 pointer (4 bytes or 8
bytes, depending on pointer size) per mark. Although the array is
sparse, frontends are still strongly encouraged to use marks between
1 and n, where n is the total number of marks required for this
import.

per branch
Branches are classified as active and inactive. The memory usage of
the two classes is significantly different.

Inactive branches are stored in a structure which uses 96 or 120
bytes (32 bit or 64 bit systems, respectively), plus the length of
the branch name (typically under 200 bytes), per branch. fast-import
will easily handle as many as 10,000 inactive branches in under 2 MiB
of memory.

Active branches have the same overhead as inactive branches, but also
contain copies of every tree that has been recently modified on that
branch. If subtree include has not been modified since the branch
became active, its contents will not be loaded into memory, but if
subtree src has been modified by a commit since the branch became
active, then its contents will be loaded in memory.

As active branches store metadata about the files contained on that
branch, their in-memory storage size can grow to a considerable size
(see below).

fast-import automatically moves active branches to inactive status
based on a simple least-recently-used algorithm. The LRU chain is
updated on each commit command. The maximum number of active branches
can be increased or decreased on the command line with
--active-branches=.

per active tree
Trees (aka directories) use just 12 bytes of memory on top of the
memory required for their entries (see "per active file" below). The
cost of a tree is virtually 0, as its overhead amortizes out over the
individual file entries.

per active file entry
Files (and pointers to subtrees) within active trees require 52 or 64
bytes (32/64 bit platforms) per entry. To conserve space, file and
tree names are pooled in a common string table, allowing the filename
"Makefile" to use just 16 bytes (after including the string header
overhead) no matter how many times it occurs within the project.

The active branch LRU, when coupled with the filename string pool and
lazy loading of subtrees, allows fast-import to efficiently import
projects with 2,000+ branches and 45,114+ files in a very limited
memory footprint (less than 2.7 MiB per active branch).

SIGNALS

Sending SIGUSR1 to the git fast-import process ends the current
packfile early, simulating a checkpoint command. The impatient
operator can use this facility to peek at the objects and refs from
an import in progress, at the cost of some added running time and
worse compression.

CONFIGURATION

Everything below this line in this section is selectively included
from the git-config(1) documentation. The content is the same as
what's found there:

fastimport.unpackLimit
If the number of objects imported by git-fast-import(1) is below
this limit, then the objects will be unpacked into loose object
files. However, if the number of imported objects equals or
exceeds this limit, then the pack will be stored as a pack.
Storing the pack from a fast-import can make the import operation
complete faster, especially on slow filesystems. If not set, the
value of transfer.unpackLimit is used instead.

SEE ALSO

git-fast-export(1)

GIT

Part of the git(1) suite

Git 2.48.1 2025-01-13 GIT-FAST-IMPORT(1)