SCALAR(1) Git Manual SCALAR(1)
scalar - A tool for managing large Git repositories
scalar clone [--single-branch] [--branch <main-branch>] [--full-clone]
[--[no-]src] [--[no-]tags] [--[no-]maintenance] <url> [<enlistment>]
scalar list
scalar register [--[no-]maintenance] [<enlistment>]
scalar unregister [<enlistment>]
scalar run ( all | config | commit-graph | fetch | loose-objects | pack-files ) [<enlistment>]
scalar reconfigure [--maintenance=(enable|disable|keep)] [ --all | <enlistment> ]
scalar diagnose [<enlistment>]
scalar delete <enlistment>
Scalar is a repository management tool that optimizes Git for use in
large repositories. Scalar improves performance by configuring
advanced Git settings, maintaining repositories in the background,
and helping to reduce data sent across the network.
An important Scalar concept is the enlistment: this is the top-level
directory of the project. It usually contains the subdirectory src/
which is a Git worktree. This encourages the separation between
tracked files (inside src/) and untracked files, such as build
artifacts (outside src/). When registering an existing Git worktree
with Scalar whose name is not src, the enlistment will be identical
to the worktree.
The scalar command implements various subcommands, and different
options depending on the subcommand. With the exception of clone,
list and reconfigure --all, all subcommands expect to be run in an
enlistment.
The following options can be specified before the subcommand:
-C <directory>
Before running the subcommand, change the working directory. This
option imitates the same option of git(1).
-c <key>=<value>
For the duration of running the specified subcommand, configure
this setting. This option imitates the same option of git(1).
clone [<options>] <url> [<enlistment>]
Clones the specified repository, similar to git-clone(1). By
default, only commit and tree objects are cloned. Once finished,
the worktree is located at <enlistment>/src.
The sparse-checkout feature is enabled (except when run with
--full-clone) and the only files present are those in the
top-level directory. Use git sparse-checkout set to expand the
set of directories you want to see, or git sparse-checkout
disable to expand to all files (see git-sparse-checkout(1) for
more details). You can explore the subdirectories outside your
sparse-checkout by using git ls-tree HEAD[:<directory>].
-b <name>, --branch <name>
Instead of checking out the branch pointed to by the cloned
repository's HEAD, check out the <name> branch instead.
--single-branch, --no-single-branch
Clone only the history leading to the tip of a single branch,
either specified by the --branch option or the primary branch
remote's HEAD points at.
Further fetches into the resulting repository will only update
the remote-tracking branch for the branch this option was used
for the initial cloning. If the HEAD at the remote did not point
at any branch when --single-branch clone was made, no
remote-tracking branch is created.
--src, --no-src
By default, scalar clone places the cloned repository within a
<entlistment>/src directory. Use --no-src to place the cloned
repository directly in the <enlistment> directory.
--tags, --no-tags
By default, scalar clone will fetch the tag objects advertised by
the remote and future git fetch commands will do the same. Use
--no-tags to avoid fetching tags in scalar clone and to configure
the repository to avoid fetching tags in the future. To fetch
tags after cloning with --no-tags, run git fetch --tags.
--full-clone, --no-full-clone
A sparse-checkout is initialized by default. This behavior can be
turned off via --full-clone.
--maintenance, --no-maintenance
By default, scalar clone configures the enlistment to use Git's
background maintenance feature. Use the --no-maintenance to skip
this configuration.
list
List enlistments that are currently registered by Scalar. This
subcommand does not need to be run inside an enlistment.
register [<enlistment>]
Adds the enlistment's repository to the list of registered
repositories and starts background maintenance. If <enlistment>
is not provided, then the enlistment associated with the current
working directory is registered.
Note: when this subcommand is called in a worktree that is called
src/, its parent directory is considered to be the Scalar
enlistment. If the worktree is not called src/, it itself will be
considered to be the Scalar enlistment.
--maintenance, --no-maintenance
By default, scalar register configures the enlistment to use
Git's background maintenance feature. Use the --no-maintenance to
skip this configuration. This does not disable any maintenance
that may already be enabled in other ways.
unregister [<enlistment>]
Remove the specified repository from the list of repositories
registered with Scalar and stop the scheduled background
maintenance.
scalar run ( all | config | commit-graph | fetch | loose-objects |
pack-files ) [<enlistment>]
Run the given maintenance task (or all tasks, if all was
specified). Except for all and config, this subcommand simply
hands off to git-maintenance(1) (mapping fetch to prefetch and
pack-files to incremental-repack).
These tasks are run automatically as part of the scheduled
maintenance, as soon as the repository is registered with Scalar.
It should therefore not be necessary to run this subcommand
manually.
The config task is specific to Scalar and configures all those
opinionated default settings that make Git work more efficiently
with large repositories. As this task is run as part of scalar
clone automatically, explicit invocations of this task are rarely
needed.
After a Scalar upgrade, or when the configuration of a Scalar
enlistment was somehow corrupted or changed by mistake, this
subcommand allows to reconfigure the enlistment.
--all
When --all is specified, reconfigure all enlistments currently
registered with Scalar by the scalar.repo config key. Use this
option after each upgrade to get the latest features.
--maintenance=(enable|disable|keep)
By default, Scalar configures the enlistment to use Git's
background maintenance feature; this is the same as using the
enable value for this option. Use the disable value to remove
each considered enlistment from background maintenance. Use
"keep" to leave the background maintenance configuration
untouched for these repositories.
diagnose [<enlistment>]
When reporting issues with Scalar, it is often helpful to provide
the information gathered by this command, including logs and
certain statistics describing the data shape of the current
enlistment.
The output of this command is a .zip file that is written into a
directory adjacent to the worktree in the src directory.
delete <enlistment>
This subcommand lets you delete an existing Scalar enlistment
from your local file system, unregistering the repository.
As part of both scalar clone and scalar register, certain Git config
values are set to optimize for large repositories or cross-platform
support. These options are updated in new Git versions according to
the best known advice for large repositories, and users can get the
latest recommendations by running scalar reconfigure [--all].
This section lists justifications for the config values that are set
in the latest version.
am.keepCR=true
This setting is important for cross-platform development across
Windows and non-Windows platforms and keeping carriage return
(\r) characters in certain workflows.
commitGraph.changedPaths=true
This setting helps the background maintenance steps that compute
the serialized commit-graph to also store changed-path Bloom
filters. This accelerates file history commands and allows users
to automatically benefit without running a foreground command.
commitGraph.generationVersion=1
While the preferred version is 2 for performance reasons,
existing users that had version 1 by default will need special
care in upgrading to version 2. This is likely to change in the
future as the upgrade story solidifies.
core.autoCRLF=false
This removes the transformation of worktree files to add CRLF
line endings when only LF line endings exist. This is removed for
performance reasons. Repositories that use tools that care about
CRLF line endings should commit the necessary files with those
line endings instead.
core.logAllRefUpdates=true
This enables the reflog on all branches. While this is a
performance cost for large repositories, it is frequently an
important data source for users to get out of bad situations or
to seek support from experts.
core.safeCRLF=false
Similar to core.autoCRLF=false, this disables checks around
whether the CRLF conversion is reversible. This is a performance
improvement, but can be dangerous if core.autoCRLF is reenabled
by the user.
credential.https://dev.azure.com.useHttpPath=true
This setting enables the credential.useHttpPath feature only for
web URLs for Azure DevOps. This is important for users
interacting with that service using multiple organizations and
thus multiple credential tokens.
feature.experimental=false
This disables the "experimental" optimizations grouped under this
feature config. The expectation is that all valuable
optimizations are also set explicitly by Scalar config, and any
differences are intentional. Notable differences include several
bitmap-related config options which are disabled for
client-focused Scalar repos.
feature.manyFiles=false
This disables the "many files" optimizations grouped under this
feature config. The expectation is that all valuable
optimizations are also set explicitly by Scalar config, and any
differences are intentional.
fetch.showForcedUpdates=false
This disables the check at the end of git fetch that notifies the
user if the ref update was a forced update (one where the
previous position is not reachable from the latest position).
This check can be very expensive in large repositories, so is
disabled and replaced with an advice message. Set
advice.fetchShowForcedUpdates=false to disable this advice
message.
fetch.unpackLimit=1
This setting prevents Git from unpacking packfiles into loose
objects as they are downloaded from the server. The default limit
of 100 was intended as a way to prevent performance issues from
too many packfiles, but Scalar uses background maintenance to
group packfiles and cover them with a multi-pack-index, removing
this issue.
fetch.writeCommitGraph=false
This config setting was created to help users automatically
update their commit-graph files as they perform fetches. However,
this takes time from foreground fetches and pulls and Scalar uses
background maintenance for this function instead.
gc.auto=0
This disables automatic garbage collection, since Scalar uses
background maintenance to keep the repository data in good shape.
gui.GCWarning=false
Since Scalar disables garbage collection by setting gc.auto=0,
the git-gui tool may start to warn about this setting. Disable
this warning as Scalar's background maintenance configuration
makes the warning irrelevant.
index.skipHash=true
Disable computing the hash of the index contents as it is being
written. This assists with performance, especially for large
index files.
index.threads=true
This tells Git to automatically detect how many threads it should
use when reading the index due to the default value of
core.preloadIndex, which enables parallel index reads. This
explicit setting also enables index.recordOffsetTable=true to
speed up parallel index reads.
index.version=4
This index version adds compression to the path names, reducing
the size of the index in a significant way for large repos. This
is an important performance boost.
log.excludeDecoration=refs/prefetch/*
Since Scalar enables background maintenance with the incremental
strategy, this setting avoids polluting git log output with refs
stored by the background prefetch operations.
merge.renames=true
When computing merges in large repos, it is particularly
important to detect renames to maximize the potential for a
result that will validate correctly. Users performing merges
locally are more likely to be doing so because a server-side
merge (via pull request or similar) resulted in conflicts. While
this is the default setting, it is set specifically to override a
potential change to diff.renames which a user may set for
performance reasons.
merge.stat=false
This disables a diff output after computing a merge. This
improves performance of git merge for large repos while reducing
noisy output.
pack.useBitmaps=false
This disables the use of .bitmap files attached to packfiles.
Bitmap files are optimized for server-side use, not client-side
use. Scalar disables this to avoid some performance issues that
can occur if a user accidentally creates .bitmap files.
pack.usePathWalk=true
This enables the --path-walk option to git pack-objects by
default. This can accelerate the computation and compression of
packfiles created by git push and other repack operations.
receive.autoGC=false
Similar to gc.auto, this setting is disabled in preference of
background maintenance.
status.aheadBehind=false
This disables the ahead/behind calculation that would normally
happen during a git status command. This information is
frequently ignored by users but can be expensive to calculate in
large repos that receive thousands of commits per day. The
calculation is replaced with an advice message that can be
disabled by disabling the advice.statusAheadBehind config.
The following settings are different based on which platform is in
use:
core.untrackedCache=(true|false)
The untracked cache feature is important for performance benefits
on large repositories, but has demonstrated some bugs on Windows
filesystems. Thus, this is set for other platforms but disabled
on Windows.
http.sslBackend=schannel
On Windows, the openssl backend has some issues with certain
types of remote providers and certificate types. Override the
default setting to avoid these common problems.
git-clone(1), git-maintenance(1).
Part of the git(1) suite
Git 2.53.0 2026-02-01 SCALAR(1)
NAME
scalar - A tool for managing large Git repositories
SYNOPSIS
scalar clone [--single-branch] [--branch <main-branch>] [--full-clone]
[--[no-]src] [--[no-]tags] [--[no-]maintenance] <url> [<enlistment>]
scalar list
scalar register [--[no-]maintenance] [<enlistment>]
scalar unregister [<enlistment>]
scalar run ( all | config | commit-graph | fetch | loose-objects | pack-files ) [<enlistment>]
scalar reconfigure [--maintenance=(enable|disable|keep)] [ --all | <enlistment> ]
scalar diagnose [<enlistment>]
scalar delete <enlistment>
DESCRIPTION
Scalar is a repository management tool that optimizes Git for use in
large repositories. Scalar improves performance by configuring
advanced Git settings, maintaining repositories in the background,
and helping to reduce data sent across the network.
An important Scalar concept is the enlistment: this is the top-level
directory of the project. It usually contains the subdirectory src/
which is a Git worktree. This encourages the separation between
tracked files (inside src/) and untracked files, such as build
artifacts (outside src/). When registering an existing Git worktree
with Scalar whose name is not src, the enlistment will be identical
to the worktree.
The scalar command implements various subcommands, and different
options depending on the subcommand. With the exception of clone,
list and reconfigure --all, all subcommands expect to be run in an
enlistment.
The following options can be specified before the subcommand:
-C <directory>
Before running the subcommand, change the working directory. This
option imitates the same option of git(1).
-c <key>=<value>
For the duration of running the specified subcommand, configure
this setting. This option imitates the same option of git(1).
COMMANDS
Clone
clone [<options>] <url> [<enlistment>]
Clones the specified repository, similar to git-clone(1). By
default, only commit and tree objects are cloned. Once finished,
the worktree is located at <enlistment>/src.
The sparse-checkout feature is enabled (except when run with
--full-clone) and the only files present are those in the
top-level directory. Use git sparse-checkout set to expand the
set of directories you want to see, or git sparse-checkout
disable to expand to all files (see git-sparse-checkout(1) for
more details). You can explore the subdirectories outside your
sparse-checkout by using git ls-tree HEAD[:<directory>].
-b <name>, --branch <name>
Instead of checking out the branch pointed to by the cloned
repository's HEAD, check out the <name> branch instead.
--single-branch, --no-single-branch
Clone only the history leading to the tip of a single branch,
either specified by the --branch option or the primary branch
remote's HEAD points at.
Further fetches into the resulting repository will only update
the remote-tracking branch for the branch this option was used
for the initial cloning. If the HEAD at the remote did not point
at any branch when --single-branch clone was made, no
remote-tracking branch is created.
--src, --no-src
By default, scalar clone places the cloned repository within a
<entlistment>/src directory. Use --no-src to place the cloned
repository directly in the <enlistment> directory.
--tags, --no-tags
By default, scalar clone will fetch the tag objects advertised by
the remote and future git fetch commands will do the same. Use
--no-tags to avoid fetching tags in scalar clone and to configure
the repository to avoid fetching tags in the future. To fetch
tags after cloning with --no-tags, run git fetch --tags.
--full-clone, --no-full-clone
A sparse-checkout is initialized by default. This behavior can be
turned off via --full-clone.
--maintenance, --no-maintenance
By default, scalar clone configures the enlistment to use Git's
background maintenance feature. Use the --no-maintenance to skip
this configuration.
List
list
List enlistments that are currently registered by Scalar. This
subcommand does not need to be run inside an enlistment.
Register
register [<enlistment>]
Adds the enlistment's repository to the list of registered
repositories and starts background maintenance. If <enlistment>
is not provided, then the enlistment associated with the current
working directory is registered.
Note: when this subcommand is called in a worktree that is called
src/, its parent directory is considered to be the Scalar
enlistment. If the worktree is not called src/, it itself will be
considered to be the Scalar enlistment.
--maintenance, --no-maintenance
By default, scalar register configures the enlistment to use
Git's background maintenance feature. Use the --no-maintenance to
skip this configuration. This does not disable any maintenance
that may already be enabled in other ways.
Unregister
unregister [<enlistment>]
Remove the specified repository from the list of repositories
registered with Scalar and stop the scheduled background
maintenance.
Run
scalar run ( all | config | commit-graph | fetch | loose-objects |
pack-files ) [<enlistment>]
Run the given maintenance task (or all tasks, if all was
specified). Except for all and config, this subcommand simply
hands off to git-maintenance(1) (mapping fetch to prefetch and
pack-files to incremental-repack).
These tasks are run automatically as part of the scheduled
maintenance, as soon as the repository is registered with Scalar.
It should therefore not be necessary to run this subcommand
manually.
The config task is specific to Scalar and configures all those
opinionated default settings that make Git work more efficiently
with large repositories. As this task is run as part of scalar
clone automatically, explicit invocations of this task are rarely
needed.
Reconfigure
After a Scalar upgrade, or when the configuration of a Scalar
enlistment was somehow corrupted or changed by mistake, this
subcommand allows to reconfigure the enlistment.
--all
When --all is specified, reconfigure all enlistments currently
registered with Scalar by the scalar.repo config key. Use this
option after each upgrade to get the latest features.
--maintenance=(enable|disable|keep)
By default, Scalar configures the enlistment to use Git's
background maintenance feature; this is the same as using the
enable value for this option. Use the disable value to remove
each considered enlistment from background maintenance. Use
"keep" to leave the background maintenance configuration
untouched for these repositories.
Diagnose
diagnose [<enlistment>]
When reporting issues with Scalar, it is often helpful to provide
the information gathered by this command, including logs and
certain statistics describing the data shape of the current
enlistment.
The output of this command is a .zip file that is written into a
directory adjacent to the worktree in the src directory.
Delete
delete <enlistment>
This subcommand lets you delete an existing Scalar enlistment
from your local file system, unregistering the repository.
RECOMMENDED CONFIG VALUES
As part of both scalar clone and scalar register, certain Git config
values are set to optimize for large repositories or cross-platform
support. These options are updated in new Git versions according to
the best known advice for large repositories, and users can get the
latest recommendations by running scalar reconfigure [--all].
This section lists justifications for the config values that are set
in the latest version.
am.keepCR=true
This setting is important for cross-platform development across
Windows and non-Windows platforms and keeping carriage return
(\r) characters in certain workflows.
commitGraph.changedPaths=true
This setting helps the background maintenance steps that compute
the serialized commit-graph to also store changed-path Bloom
filters. This accelerates file history commands and allows users
to automatically benefit without running a foreground command.
commitGraph.generationVersion=1
While the preferred version is 2 for performance reasons,
existing users that had version 1 by default will need special
care in upgrading to version 2. This is likely to change in the
future as the upgrade story solidifies.
core.autoCRLF=false
This removes the transformation of worktree files to add CRLF
line endings when only LF line endings exist. This is removed for
performance reasons. Repositories that use tools that care about
CRLF line endings should commit the necessary files with those
line endings instead.
core.logAllRefUpdates=true
This enables the reflog on all branches. While this is a
performance cost for large repositories, it is frequently an
important data source for users to get out of bad situations or
to seek support from experts.
core.safeCRLF=false
Similar to core.autoCRLF=false, this disables checks around
whether the CRLF conversion is reversible. This is a performance
improvement, but can be dangerous if core.autoCRLF is reenabled
by the user.
credential.https://dev.azure.com.useHttpPath=true
This setting enables the credential.useHttpPath feature only for
web URLs for Azure DevOps. This is important for users
interacting with that service using multiple organizations and
thus multiple credential tokens.
feature.experimental=false
This disables the "experimental" optimizations grouped under this
feature config. The expectation is that all valuable
optimizations are also set explicitly by Scalar config, and any
differences are intentional. Notable differences include several
bitmap-related config options which are disabled for
client-focused Scalar repos.
feature.manyFiles=false
This disables the "many files" optimizations grouped under this
feature config. The expectation is that all valuable
optimizations are also set explicitly by Scalar config, and any
differences are intentional.
fetch.showForcedUpdates=false
This disables the check at the end of git fetch that notifies the
user if the ref update was a forced update (one where the
previous position is not reachable from the latest position).
This check can be very expensive in large repositories, so is
disabled and replaced with an advice message. Set
advice.fetchShowForcedUpdates=false to disable this advice
message.
fetch.unpackLimit=1
This setting prevents Git from unpacking packfiles into loose
objects as they are downloaded from the server. The default limit
of 100 was intended as a way to prevent performance issues from
too many packfiles, but Scalar uses background maintenance to
group packfiles and cover them with a multi-pack-index, removing
this issue.
fetch.writeCommitGraph=false
This config setting was created to help users automatically
update their commit-graph files as they perform fetches. However,
this takes time from foreground fetches and pulls and Scalar uses
background maintenance for this function instead.
gc.auto=0
This disables automatic garbage collection, since Scalar uses
background maintenance to keep the repository data in good shape.
gui.GCWarning=false
Since Scalar disables garbage collection by setting gc.auto=0,
the git-gui tool may start to warn about this setting. Disable
this warning as Scalar's background maintenance configuration
makes the warning irrelevant.
index.skipHash=true
Disable computing the hash of the index contents as it is being
written. This assists with performance, especially for large
index files.
index.threads=true
This tells Git to automatically detect how many threads it should
use when reading the index due to the default value of
core.preloadIndex, which enables parallel index reads. This
explicit setting also enables index.recordOffsetTable=true to
speed up parallel index reads.
index.version=4
This index version adds compression to the path names, reducing
the size of the index in a significant way for large repos. This
is an important performance boost.
log.excludeDecoration=refs/prefetch/*
Since Scalar enables background maintenance with the incremental
strategy, this setting avoids polluting git log output with refs
stored by the background prefetch operations.
merge.renames=true
When computing merges in large repos, it is particularly
important to detect renames to maximize the potential for a
result that will validate correctly. Users performing merges
locally are more likely to be doing so because a server-side
merge (via pull request or similar) resulted in conflicts. While
this is the default setting, it is set specifically to override a
potential change to diff.renames which a user may set for
performance reasons.
merge.stat=false
This disables a diff output after computing a merge. This
improves performance of git merge for large repos while reducing
noisy output.
pack.useBitmaps=false
This disables the use of .bitmap files attached to packfiles.
Bitmap files are optimized for server-side use, not client-side
use. Scalar disables this to avoid some performance issues that
can occur if a user accidentally creates .bitmap files.
pack.usePathWalk=true
This enables the --path-walk option to git pack-objects by
default. This can accelerate the computation and compression of
packfiles created by git push and other repack operations.
receive.autoGC=false
Similar to gc.auto, this setting is disabled in preference of
background maintenance.
status.aheadBehind=false
This disables the ahead/behind calculation that would normally
happen during a git status command. This information is
frequently ignored by users but can be expensive to calculate in
large repos that receive thousands of commits per day. The
calculation is replaced with an advice message that can be
disabled by disabling the advice.statusAheadBehind config.
The following settings are different based on which platform is in
use:
core.untrackedCache=(true|false)
The untracked cache feature is important for performance benefits
on large repositories, but has demonstrated some bugs on Windows
filesystems. Thus, this is set for other platforms but disabled
on Windows.
http.sslBackend=schannel
On Windows, the openssl backend has some issues with certain
types of remote providers and certificate types. Override the
default setting to avoid these common problems.
SEE ALSO
git-clone(1), git-maintenance(1).
GIT
Part of the git(1) suite
Git 2.53.0 2026-02-01 SCALAR(1)